SQL Server 2017 Developer's Guide

Types of temporal tables

You might have noticed during the introduction part at the beginning of this chapter that there are two kinds of temporal issues. The first one is the validity time of the proposition—a time period in which the proposition that a timestamped row in a table represents was actually true. For example, a contract with a supplier was valid only from time point 1 to time point 2. This kind of validity time is meaningful to people and meaningful for the business. The validity time is also called application time or human time. We can have multiple valid periods for the same entity. For example, the aforementioned contract that was valid from time point 1 to time point 2 might also be valid from time point 7 to time point ...