Incorporating Cell Level Integrity in Relational Databases

In the recent years, rapid growth in real time, event driven, and smart or proactive applications brought forward several challenges of managing the data. In this paper, we explore how the time dimension plays an important role in all these recent developments, and we propose a unified framework to bring all the temporal requirements under one umbrella. Although solid foundation of Relational Database management Systems (RDBMS) has existed, new requirements reveal the inability of RDBMS to handle time sensitive data. To overcome these limitations, several new databases were proposed, such as Active Databases [6], Temporal Databases [18], Real time Databases [25], etc. However, each one of them addressed temporal requirements only partially. This paper attempts to list all possible requirements that are time sensitive and proposes a unified framework, which if incorporated in relational model, can implement data integrity at cell level. This paper elucidates several use-cases, and demonstrates the importance of proposed work through experiments and results.