Patent ID: 8631042

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for analyzing historical data in a data warehouse, comprising: providing a data warehouse, wherein each fact table within the data warehouse has a start time column and an end time column, each record of the fact tables has a start time value specified in the start time column, the start time value indicating an insertion time stamp of the record into the fact table, each record of the fact tables has an end time value specified in the end time column, the end time value being one of: an infinity time stamp indicating that the record is a current record and a non-infinity time stamp indicating that the record is a historical record, and the fact tables within the data warehouse collectively form a single searchable copy of data warehouse data that contains both continuous historical data and current data for the data warehouse; and in response to a query against the data warehouse, retrieving records from one or more fact tables using a pair of customized query predicates against the start time column values and the end time column values of the one or more fact tables.