Logical Data Expiration (Invited Talk)

Data expiration is an essential component of data warehousing solutions: whenever large amounts of data are repeatedly collected over a period of time, it is essential to have a clear approach to identifying parts of the data no-longer needed and a policy that allows disposing and/or archiving these parts of the data. Such policies are necessary even if adding storage to accommodate an evergrowing collection of data were possible, since the growing amount of data needs to be examined during querying and turn leads to deterioration of query performance over time. The approaches to data expiration range from adhoc administrative policies or regulations to sophisticated data analysis-based techniques. The approaches have, however, one thing in common: intuitively, they try to identify the parts of the data collection that are not needed in the future. The key to deciding if a piece of information will be needed in the future lies in identifying what queries can be asked over the collection of data and how the collection can evolve from its current state. The various techniques proposed in the literature differ in the way they identify no longer needed parts