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More On Temporal Tables

Newly-minted Canadian citizen Randolph West’s latest article is on modifying temporal tables:

Last week I demonstrated how temporal tables in SQL Server 2016 work. If you have implemented a history table—populating it with triggers or stored procedures—it works the same way.

This week, we are going to look at how to modify a temporal table that already has data in the history table.

If you’re using temporal tables for auditing, it’s important to know that yes, data can be modified.

Reza Rad also has a recent blog post on temporal tables:

Temporal tables are new type of database tables introduced in SQL Server 2016, these tables are system-versioned and keep history of changes (insert, delete, update) of everything happened on data rows. Retrieving change log from these tables are easy. These tables can simply tell you what was the data at specific point of the time in the table. These tables works with datetime2 columns to keep FROM DATE and TO DATE information of each change. This means these tables can be used for implementing changes in dimensions, yes you know what it called; Slowly Changing Dimension!

Slowly-changing dimensions in an OLTP scenario was the first use I could think of for temporal tables, so I’m glad Reza put this article together.