Commercial DBMS offer mechanisms for views and for versions. Research and d
evelopment efforts in these directions are, however, characterized by conce
ntration on either the one or the other mechanism, very seldom trying to ta
ke advantage of their complementary properties. This paper presents the mul
tiversion view mechanism, which allows these orthogonal concepts to be mana
ged together, taking advantage of their combined characteristics. Unlike pr
evious efforts to combine views and versions, multiversion views create vie
ws over versions of data, thereby offering users coherent logical units of
the versioned world. They allow a wide range of (virtual) data reorganizati
on possibilities, which encompass, among others, operations found in tempor
al databases and CLAP. Multiversion views are illustrated and motivated by
needs from a real life large case study of complex configuration management
, described at the end of the paper. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rig
hts reserved.