One of the new features coming in SQL Server 2016 is the temporal table. It's an interesting concept, one that many businesses have wanted for years. If you're not sure what this is, we've got a collection of resources on Learning about Temporal Tables (and other features). Check them out and we'll keep adding content as we find it.

Temporal tables give us some amazing capabilities, but at a cost. As with anything in computers, there is a cost for capability. In this case, we can look back at the view of our data as of a particular point in time. In many ways, this means that we don't need to bolt on, or query into, auditing data.

However there are other costs. As with any auditing system, we potentially have substantial data that we need to manage somehow. Certainly we need to choose which tables to track. Even if we don't have to build a process, we will have to deal with the cost of storage and provisioning, as well as determining the retention periods. We also need to really depend on the system times for our various instances to be in sync.

I think that this is a needed, and very useful feature. I'm sure there will be bugs to patch, as well as enhancements to be built. We'll find those over time, but I think that this is one of those features that we'll come to see as essential in a decade and wonder how we ever built systems without it.