History table overhead
Converting a non-temporal table into a temporal table is very easy. With two ALTER TABLE statements you get the full temporal table functionality. However, this cannot be completely free. Adding temporal features to a table brings performance overhead in all data modification operations. According to Microsoft, a single update operation against a row in a temporal table is about 30% slower than it would be when the table is non-temporal.
I have performed a simple test where I have updated a different number of rows in a table before it is converted to a temporal table and afterwards. The following graph displays results of this test. For a small amount of rows (<1000), locking, calculating, and inserting data into a ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access