pg_bitemporal VS temporal_tables

I feel like i keep yelling the following, but bitemporal tables.

- https://aiven.io/blog/two-dimensional-time-with-bitemporal-d...

- https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal

4 timestamps and some ugly queries.

People here may also be interested to see this analysis of the state of SQL:2011 "temporal table" feature adoption: https://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2019/08/sql2011-surve...

I don't think much has really changed since, and I'm not sure Postgres is any closer to addressing this natively (although there have been extensions, e.g. https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal).

Something more sophisticated would be https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal

Sure, I can appreciate that native support for a feature like this is nice.

As I understand it, most implementations (including another one for bitemporality[1]) involve either audit tables, as you mention, and/or additional support columns. It's as if the "now" representation is simply a narrow lens onto the underlying data.

That said, PostgreSQL encodes and has battle-tested decades of database functionality including an ecosystem around those, so I'd be a little wary of switching technology even if it does solve one individual problem thoroughly. Everything has to start somewhere, though.

[1] - https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal

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.