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Category: Temporal Tables

Modifying Data In Temporal Tables

Published 2018-07-24 by Kevin Feasel

Jeanne Combrinck shows us how we can insert, update, and delete data in temporal tables:

You delete data in the current table with a regular DELETE statement. The end period column for deleted rows will be populated with the begin time of underlying transaction.
You cannot directly delete rows from history table while SYSTEM_VERSIONING = ON.

Set SYSTEM_VERSIONING = OFF and delete rows from current and history table but keep in mind that way system will not preserve history of changes. TRUNCATE, SWITCH PARTITION OUT of current table and SWITCH PARTITION IN history table are not supported while SYSTEM_VERSIONING = ON.

Data modification is reasonably straightforward with temporal tables.  Read on for examples.

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Using Temporal Tables For Auditing Changes

Published 2018-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Nisarg Upadhyay shows how to use temporal tables for basic data auditing:

To audit the data changes for a specific table, we should perform the time-based analysis of temporal tables. To do that, we must use the ‘FOR SYSTEM_TIME’ clause with below temporal-specific sub-clauses to the query data across the current and history tables. Let me explain the output of queries using different sub-clauses. Below is the setup:

  1. I inserted a product named ‘Flat Washer 8’ with List price 0.00 in the temporal table at 09:02:25 AM.

  2. I changed the List Price at 10:13:56 AM. New Price is 500.00.

Temporal tables aren’t going to solve all of your auditing problems but it can be useful.

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Temporal Table Permissions

Published 2017-10-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher shows us the permissions needed to create temporal tables:

Msg 13538, Level 16, State 3, Line 6
You do not have the required permissions to complete the operation.

Well, that’s not good. What permissions do I need exactly? Well, again, according to BOL I need CONTROL on the table and its history table. For those that don’t know CONTROL is the top level permission for any object. You can do anything at all with it.

Read the whole thing.  I gather the reason for requiring this level of access is that you don’t want people to go monkeying with data collected for auditing purposes.

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Automating Temporal Table Creation

Published 2017-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Fellows got an increasingly specific set of requirements about data collection:

This post is another in the continuing theme of “making things consistent.” We were voluntold to help another team get their staging environment set up. Piece of cake, SQL Compare made it trivial to snap the tables over.

Oh, we don’t want these tables in Custom schema, we want them in dbo. No problem, SQL Compare again and change owner mappings and bam, out come all the tables.

Oh, can we get this in near real-time? Say every 15 minutes. … Transaction replication to the rescue!

Oh, we don’t know what data we need yet so could you keep it all, forever? … Temporal tables to the rescue?

Yes, temporal tables is perfect. But don’t put the history table in the same schema as the table, put in this one. And put all of that in its own file group.

Click through for a helpful script, and tune in next time, when the other team has Bill move their furniture around.  Maybe move the couch just a hair to the right…no, a little more, oops, too much…

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Temporal Table Time Zones

Published 2017-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson talks about how to translate temporal table start and end dates to your local time zone:

In my first 5 blogs on Temporal, I failed to note something pretty important about their usage. The start and end times for the row (and it follows, the historical rows) are likely not in your local time zone. They are stored in UTC time zone. This is obviously good because of that pesky daylight saving time issue where 1:30 AM occurs twice each year (here in the US, the time occurs on the first Sunday of November).

Unless you live in London, England or someplace where the offset from UTC is 0, it can make working with these tables confusing, because most people rarely work in UTC time, and even rarer is to think in UTC time when most of your data is likely in your local time zone. So you write your query and use local time…and then, most likely, data is returned…but not necessarily the data you actually desired.

Click through to see ways of translating those values.

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Temporal Memory-Optimized Tables

Published 2017-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Ned Otter describes how hybrid disk + memory-optimized temporal tables differ from on-disk temporal tables:

As changes are made to rows in the temporal memory-optimized table, before being transferred to the history table on disk, they are first migrated to an internal memory-optimized staging table. That means when you query the “history table”, you could be retrieving rows from both the on-disk history table, and internal staging table. Because no custom indexing was possible on the internal staging table, there could be performance implications when executing queries against historical data. Microsoft addressed these potential performance issues in SQL 2016 SP1 (detailed in this CAT blog post).

The internal staging table only gets flushed to the on-disk history table when it reaches 8% of the size of the temporal table. Given the current capacities of Windows Server 2016 (24TB memory), it’s now possible to have very large memory-optimized tables. 8% of one of those large memory-optimized tables could be quite large, which will affect query performance, if predicates don’t match available indexes.

Read on for some sobering thoughts on the topic.

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Using Temporal Tables For SCD2

Published 2017-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

I have a post on pain that I experienced with temporal tables:

This query succeeds but returns results we don’t really want:

ProductModelTemporalSameDate

This brings back all 9 records tied to products 1 and 2 (because product 3 didn’t exist on July 2nd at 8 AM UTC). But it gives us the same start and end date, so that’s not right. What I really want to do is replace @InterestingTime with qsp‘s DatePredictionMade, so let’s try that:

ProductModelTemporalInvalid

This returns a syntax error. It would appear that at the time FOR SYSTEM_TIME is resolved, QuantitySoldPrediction does not yet exist. This stops us dead in our tracks.

This is one of the two things I’d really like to change about temporal tables; the other thing (now that auto-retention is slated for release) is the ability to backfill data without turning off system versioning.

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Automatic Temporal Table Data Purging

Published 2017-07-05 by Kevin Feasel

Bert Wagner has warmed the cockles of my heart with this news:

The problem with temporal tables is that they produce a lot of data. Every row-level change stored in the temporal table’s history table quickly adds up, increasing the possibility that a low-disk space warning is going to be sent to the DBA on-call.

In the future with SQL Server 2017 CTP3, Microsoft allows us to add a retention period to our temporal tables, making purging old data in a temporal table as easy as specifying:

I’m in a situation where this will be very useful.

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Business Use Cases For Temporal Tables

Published 2017-06-22 by Kevin Feasel

Bert Wagner walks through some of the business cases for using temporal tables:

I know this query seems lame — it’s just a SELECT FROM statement. There are no FOR SYSTEM TIME clauses, WHERE statements, and no other interesting T-SQL features.

But that’s the point! Have you ever had to get the “current” rows out of a table that is keeping track of all transactions? I’m sure it involved some GROUP BY statements, some window functions, and more than a few cups of coffee.

Temporal tables automatically manage your transaction history, providing the most current records in one table (dbo.CarInventory) and all of the historical transactions in another (dbo.CarInventoryHistory). No need for complicated queries.

Temporal tables definitely have their uses.  At present, those uses are primarily around versioned fact data.

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