temporal_tables VS temporal_tables

It was reimplemented in pure SQL here https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables for this purpose

I enjoyed this blog. I think it provides a great succinct overview of various approaches native to Postgres.

For the "capture changes in an audit table" section, I've had good experiences at a previous company with the Temporal Tables pattern. Unlike other major RDBMS vendors, it's not built into Postgres itself, but there's a simple pattern [1] you can leverage with a SQL function.

This allows you to see a table's state as of a specific point in time. Some sample use cases:

- "What was this user's configuration on Aug 12?"

- "How many records were unprocessed at 11:55pm last night?"

- "Show me the diff on feature flags between now and a week ago"

[1]: https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables

One of these Postgres-based implementations of SQL:2011's temporal versioning features might get you close enough:

- https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables

You don't really need to install an extension to use temporal tables, there is an alternative (https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables) implemented purely as a plpgsql trigger so that it works everywhere.

I was part of a team at NearForm using this for a project on an EC2 instance. In order to move to AWS RDS we had to recreate the functionality of temporal_tables as a PostgreSQL function, rather than extension.

When we switched, we found that although there were minor bugs, we didn't have any noticeable loss of performance and we have used it ever since for many projects.

https://github.com/nearform/temporal_tables

If you're also limited by cloud services and the extensions limitations, this is a great solution.

There is also the temporal_tables extension.

[0] https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables

- https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables

I haven't used any of these but I work on https://xtdb.com which is also implementing SQL:2011's temporal features :)

It seems like PG has this extension here anyone ever use it?

You could look at that or ask me questions about it (disclaimer, I am the author). Also there is https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables/

All good. Note there is also https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables/ (which is also type 4 as a postgres extension - pretty similar to what ebean orm is doing)

The Temporal Tables Postgres extension works well. https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables

If you're doing this across regions, you really really should reconsider. If you're doing it in the same data center you might be able to get away with it (but then I'm not sure why you're doing it in the first place, if the system fits in one DC then you probably can just scale up). It might be worth considering a sharded & passively combined approach -- i.e. every country has it's own data, and there's some huge public schema which consists of all the data that is drip fed in to materialized views or tables at regular intervals. You could also combine this with temporal_tables to get a very delayed but theoretically time-consistent (well, aside from clock skew across regions of course...) view of your DB to query... Really depends on the use case.

One of postgres's most underrated features. RLS is amazing, can be unseen/basically work silently if your programming language-side tools are good enough, and is documented well (like everything else):

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-rowsecurity.html

But the power of PG is that it doesn't stop there, if you combine this with a plugin like temporal_tables and you can segment by user and time:

https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables

All of this mostly unknown to the thing that's accessing the DB. If that's not enough for you, why not add some auditing with pgaudit:

https://www.pgaudit.org/#section_three

I think it might not actually be hyperbole to say that Postgres is the greatest RDBMS database that has ever existed.