Monthly Archives: August 2015

We have discussed what is a temporal table, how we can create it, and what are the limitations of a temporal table. We have also discussed how we can convert an existing table to a temporal table in our previous posts.

In this post “querying temporal table data” we are going to learn how to query the time varying data from a temporal table.

In SQL Server 2016, we have a new clause FOR SYSTEM_TIME, which has four new sub clauses to query temporal table data:

1. AS OF <datetime>
2. FROM <start_datetime> TO <end_datetime>
3. BETWEEN <start_datetime> AND <end_datetime>
4. CONTAINED IN (start_datetime, end_datetime)

Let’s create a temporal table with dummy data to query with FOR SYSTEM_TIME clause and its sub clauses with examples. Below script is used to create a temporal table and to insert few dummy rows in the table with SQL Server default datetime value (1900-01-01) … More

In the previous post, we have discussed the temporal table, which is introduced in SQL Server 2016 to store the time varying data (current data and the data change history along with the time period). There, we have also learnt how we can create a temporal table from scratch.

In this post “Convert existing table to temporal table“, we are going to learn how we can convert an existing table to a temporal table. For the demo purpose we are using a dummy employee table, created with a very small subset of the data taken from HumanResources.Employee table of adventure works database.

Below is the dummy table which needs to be converted in a temporal table:

Existing employee master table

We can use below script to create the above sample table with the data for demo purpose:

--Create demo employee master table
CREATE TABLE dbo.EmployeeMaster
(
BusinessEntityID 

In this post we are going to discuss “Temporal Table”, a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2016. Lets start this post “Temporal Table in SQL Server” with the definition of temporal table.

Temporal Table facilitates inbuilt support for data change tracing along with the time period in a table. It holds the current as well as historical data to determine the values of a record at any given period of time. Temporal table uses a pair of tables; current table and an associated history table, to store current and historical data respectively. It uses two system columns of data type datetime2 to record start time and end time in both tables (current and history) to enable record versioning.

We can easily manage the data change history in a table using temporal tables which was a bit cumbersome and manual task in the previous versions of Microsoft SQL Server. Temporal … More