A Hybrid System for Querying Flight Data

Abstract

Time Series databases have been used since their introduction in early year 2000 for storing different types of time-correlated data, for instance, metrics acquired from weather stations and information generated in trading operations. Lately, they have been evaluated as an alternative for efficiently storing and retrieving flight test data. Time Series databases are designed to return values stored for given time intervals and this is the usual response required by flight test data consumers. However, another type of demand has become very frequent inside flight test management, whereby the response to a query is not a set of time-correlated values, but value-constrained time intervals. This paper proposes the creation of a hybrid system, consisting of a relational database and time-stamped data files, so that it is possible to search for value-constrained time intervals in the relational database and, from the returned intervals, to search and retrieve all metrics contained in the time-stamped data files.