The Time Variance Authority (or TVA) is a fictional organization, a group of timeline monitors in the Marvel Universe. They first appeared in Thor vol. 1 #372 (October 1986). Created by Walt Simonson and Sal Buscema, the TVA originally paid homage to long-time Marvel writer/editor, and continuity expert, Mark Gruenwald: the TVA staff were all clones of Gruenwald.

Fictional background

The TVA claims responsibility for monitoring the multiverse and can prune timelines if they're deemed too dangerous to exist. They also take action to prevent other beings from altering the past or future. They were first seen, allowing Justice Peace, a lawman from the future, to travel to the 20th century in order to stop the killer Zaniac. Peace is able to succeed in his mission thanks to the assistance of Thor.

Despite their claims, the TVA's influence over time is not absolute. The scope of their influence is bordered by Alioth in the distant past as well as Kang the Conqueror, the Delubric Consortium, and Revelation at different eras throughout the timescape. There have also been numerous incidents of time travel or reality tampering where the TVA has failed to interfere.

Time variance is the ability to remember historic perspectives. The requirement is to be able to know how something was classified or who owned something and how this changed as time passed.

For the context of time and frequency and qualification of oscillators and amplifiers the technical terms time deviation and time variance is defined.

Understanding time variance

Future change, be it organizational, regulatory or geographical is hard to conceive. In 1988, who imagined that within a few years, Yugoslavia and East Germany would cease to exist? Enabling a data warehouse to report pre-change and post-change information together in a meaningful context is very expensive and time-consuming. Couple that with the pressure to rapidly meet other business requirements, and with the inability for any of us to predict change (especially at system design time!), and you can see why the time-variant reporting requirement is often ignored. But at what expense? The real-life case below illustrates the value of time-variant reporting: A beverage company paid rebates to customers at year-end, based on ownership of customer sites at year end. The sales data warehouse did not reflect customers selling sites to one another throughout the year, resulting in mis-payments and a multi-million dollar customer service dilemma. For regulatory compliance and other reasons, data warehouses must remember how things were in the past because at some point business people will expect to be able to be report on them that way.So it is one of the important characteristic of data warehouse