Analysis of the Effectiveness of Temporal Tables in Transactional and Analytical Systems

Abstract

This paper describes the impact of using SQL Server temporal tables in transactional and analytic databases. This type of table was added in SQL Server 2016, and it can be extremely useful when we need to store data that describes the different states of some objects at different points in time. For our experiments, we used Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD) [1], which was imported into the SQL Server database. This dataset contains data about courses, students and their interactions with Virtual Learning Environment for seven selected courses. The temporality was implemented to the only one relational table of the database for more illustrative results. The results of our experiments show significant advantages of temporal databases in comparison with non-temporal relational ones in executing some types of queries as well as in solving data mining problems using SQL Server analysis services.