Hippocratic Databases: Extending Current Transaction Processing Approaches to Satisfy the Limited Retention Principle

The concept of Hippocratic Database Systems has been introduced by Agrawal et al.. Based on international privacy legislation, ten privacy principles have been identified that an information system should meet in order to enforce privacy and data protection properties. Among those, the limited retention principle and its challenges to traditional database algorithms are considered in this paper. In particular, we examine how data records cannot merely be deleted from the database but also how their corresponding log records may be erased from the log (without violating the necessity to retain data recoverability properties). To the best of our knowledge, there exists no current transaction processing or data recovery approach that supports the deletion of data from log entries as desired by Hippocratic Database Systems.