Patent ID: 7069263

Claim:
A method of automatically capturing data for trend analysis in a database management system comprising the steps of: receiving a query for data from a database application; issuing the received query to a database management system; receiving a response to the query from the database management system, wherein the response indicating a result dataset indicates a result data table; automatically creating or updating a database table that is suitable for trend analysis, the database table comprising information upon which trend analysis is to be performed and information that is generated in order to perform the trend analysis, the database table arranged so that subsequent executions of the same query will cause the database table to be updated with the addition of a current retrieved result dataset so that multiple executions of the same database query cause database table to contain multiple retrieved result datasets upon which trend analysis is to be performed; and populating or updating the database table with data from the result dataset and with timestamp information for each row of data in the result data table, wherein the populating or updating step comprises the steps of: determining whether the result data table includes all rows of data in the result dataset; retrieving all rows in the result dataset, if the result data table does not include all rows in the result dataset; and for each row of data in the result data set, populating or updating a row in the database table with the row of data and with timestamp information.