concateneertijdsoperatie

Concateneertijdsoperatie is a term derived from Dutch that literally means “concatenation of times.” It refers to a specific operation in data processing and time-series analytics in which individual timestamp values are combined into a single composite string or numeric code. The concept is commonly applied in systems that require unique identifiers for time-indexed records, such as when creating a surrogate key for a data warehouse fact table or when constructing a versioned hash for audit logs. By concatenating year, month, day, hour, minute, and second fields, a discrete key is formed that preserves chronological order and allows for efficient range queries.

The operation typically follows a defined format, for example YYYYMMDDHHMMSS, which yields a 14‑character string that can be parsed and indexed by most relational database engines. In some implementations, a delimiter such as a hyphen or underscore is inserted to improve human readability, producing values like 2024-01-05_13-27-30. Alternatives use numeric scaling, where the concatenated string is converted to a large integer for performance benefits in distributed databases.

In analytics platforms, concateneertijdsoperatie is instrumental for partitioning time-series data. By using the concatenated key as a partition column, parallel processing engines can read contiguous chunks of time-stamped events more efficiently. Likewise, message brokers such as Apache Kafka can employ the concatenated timestamp as message keys to guarantee ordering across partitions.

The technique gained traction in the early 2000s with the rise of column-oriented databases and data warehouses. Today it is supported in SQL dialects through functions such as CONCAT or CONCAT_WS, and in programming languages via string formatting or printf-style verbs. Although simple in concept, thoughtful design of the concatenation format is essential to avoid issues such as overflow, padding errors, or loss of leading zeros that could disrupt chronological ordering.