Transaction time
In temporal databases, transaction time is the time when some data has been loaded into a database. The time when a transaction is valid can be called the transaction time-period. It is a technical timeline controlled by a integration layer. More formally, it is the point-in-time during which a fact stored in the database is considered to be true.
The period is an interval based on load times, state timeline) or technical timeline. SQL:2011 has support for transaction time through so-called system-versioned tables.
For many reasons, transaction time is almost always different from valid time. For a data warehouse to unambiguously report what actually happened in the past it must be able to combine these two timelines. In bitemporal data models, valid-time and transaction time can be represented two-dimensionally in a Cartesian coordinate system. When data is delivered from the integration layer and is to be presented in a presentation layer it is often desirable to have the data on only one timeline.
In a database table, the transaction time is often represented as an interval allowing the system to "remove" entries by using two table-columns
start_tt and end_tt. The time interval is closed ) at its upper bound. When the ending transaction time is unknown, it may be considered as until_changed. Academic researchers and some relational database management systems have represented until_changed with the largest timestamp supported or the keyword forever. This convention is a technical workaround, and not technically precise.History
The term transaction time was coined by Richard T. Snodgrass and his doctoral student Ilsoo Ahn.As of December 2011, ISO/IEC 9075, Database Language SQL:2011 Part 2: SQL/Foundation included clauses in table definitions to define "system-versioned tables".