Towards an Accommodation of Delay in Temporal Active Databases

Business rules can be formulated according to the event-condition-action structure of triggers in active databases. However, delays in the execution of such rules can cause unexpected and undesired side-effects. While business rules are commonly constructed from an external user’s perspective, users often neglect to cater for the cases in which unanticipated sequences of I/O and rule activation events occur. This paper examines this issue from the perspective of temporal databases and discusses a framework for accommodating delay in rule activation. In order to do this the paper also outlines a flexible technique to ensure correct transaction sequencing in transaction-time databases.