Where are all the native revisioned databases?

Question

I\'ve read all the SO questions, the Coding Horror articles, and Googled my brains off searching for the best ways to revision control data. They all work and they all have thei

Answer 1

Several DBMSs implement engine-level versioning mechanisms. Unfortunately there is no vendor-independent standard for this so they are all proprietary. Oracle flashback has already been mentioned. Microsoft's Change Data Capture feature in SQL Server is another one.

Answer 2

One native solution is Oracle's Flashback Database (aka Total Recall). It is a chargeable extra to the Enterprise Edition, but it is pretty cool. It transparently stores versions of the data for as long as we want to retain it, and supplies syntax to query old versions of the data. It can be enabled on a table-by-table basis.

Essentially Flashback DB is like using triggers to store records in tracking tables, but slick, performant and invisible to normal working.

Answer 3

You could read about temporal databases.

In "Temporal Data & the Relational Model" by Date, Darwen, and Lorentzos, the authors introduce a sixth normal form to account for issues in tracking temporal data.

Richard Snodgrass proposed TSQL2 as an extension to SQL to handle temporal data.

Implementations include:

• Oracle Workspace Manager
• TimeDB

Answer 4

You forgot I want performance. A DBMS is a pretty low level data storage mechanism, and in systems with billions of rows, performance can be important. Therefore, if you want this sort of auditing system, you can build it yourself using the tools available to you (eg. triggers).

Just as in a filesystem, not all files are appropriate for version control, in a database not all rows would be appropriate for version control either.