Daniel Janik notes that system-generated temporal tables automatically use page-level compression:
At first I was a bit puzzled. I noticed that the system generated table was consistently smaller than my user created table. It was not only smaller it was twice as small!
I did some further testing on my Surface this weekend and here’s what I found:
— Side note: I use Person.Address a lot in demos, so I decided to create a new table to test with in hopes of not breaking any other demos I do regularly.
I think this is a good decision for a default, but if you are unable to support page-level compression for some reason, there’s a workaround: create your history table beforehand.