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> (bi-)temporal versioning

I once spent some time trying to find a way to do bi-temporal versioning in Postgres.

The only thing I found was a half-dead abandonware external project and an associated presentation PDF from some conference the author once spoke at.

I was unaware that they previously had some form of temporal queries and deprecated it. That is a great shame.



A shame indeed, they were only a few decades too early! The support for "Time Varying Data" gets discussed briefly in this 1995 paper by Stonebraker "The Design of Postgres"

> POSTQUEL allows users to save and query historical data and versions. By default, data in a relation is never deleted or updated. Conventional retrievals always access the current tuples in the relation. Historical data can be accessed by indicating the desired time when defining a tuple variable.

> [...] Finally, POSTGRES provides support for versions. A version can be created from a relation or a snapshot. Updates to a version do not modify the underlying relation and updates to the underlying relation will be visible through the version unless the value has been modified in the version.

https://dsf.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M85-95.pdf


Those are cool features, so why were they dis-continued?




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