Versioning in SQL Tables - how to handle it?

Question

Here\'s a fictional scenario with some populated data. For tax purposes, my fictional company must retain records of historical data. For this reason, I\'ve included a version c

Answer 1

Although the question has been asked 8 years ago, it worths to mention there is feature exactly for this in SQL Server 2016. System-versioned Temporal Table

Every table in SQL Server 2016 and above can have a history table, which the historical data will be populated automatically by SQL Server itself.

All you need is to add two datetime2 columns and one clause to the table:

CREATE TABLE Employee 
(
    Id int NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,
    [Name] varchar(50) NOT NULL,
    Position varchar(50)  NULL,
    Pay money NULL,
    ValidFrom datetime2 GENERATED ALWAYS AS ROW START NOT NULL,
    ValidTo datetime2 GENERATED ALWAYS AS ROW END NOT NULL,
        PERIOD FOR SYSTEM_TIME (ValidFrom,ValidTo)
)  
WITH (SYSTEM_VERSIONING = ON);

The system versioned table creates a temporal table which maintains the history of the data. You can use a custom name WITH (SYSTEM_VERSIONING = ON ( HISTORY_TABLE = dbo.EmployeeHistory ) );

In this link you can find more details about System-version temporal tables.

As @NotMe mentioned, historical tables can be grow very fast, so there are a few ways to get around this. Take a look here