alt Hacker NewsHey I worked on this!
Thank you to everyone here saying they are excited about it. I often hear doubts that anyone wants this. Perhaps that's why vendors have been so slow to add it. And thank you 'bonesmoses for writing about it!
We are still missing system time, but if no one else wants to work on it, I hope to tackle that soon.
I have a lot of other ideas for improvement beyond SQL:2011, too. Here is a talk I gave last month about my personal roadmap:
https://illuminatedcomputing.com/pages/pgconf2026-temporal-r...
I've also been vibecoding a lisp REPL to play with the algebra of temporal relational operators (important for the planner): https://github.com/pjungwir/relsim
That overlaps with my attempt to write implementations for temporal semi/anti/outer-join and other relops: https://github.com/pjungwir/temporal_ops
If anyone has comments about what you'd like to see, I'm happy for feedback!
Replies
There’s definitely interest in this in finance domains. I’ve done DATERANGE and GiST exclude constraints based solutions for a symbology database for example, where any given ticker might represent different securities at different times without overlap, and relying on functions to keep the dateranges in sync when updating a row.
So basically what WHITOUT OVERLAPS and FOR PORTION OF do.
The system time is also interesting in the context of financial data and backtesting, as companies might republish a statement with corrections, and it would help tracking why the system made a decision at a given time.
This bridges the gap to something like xtdb.
How tied is the implementation to time specifically?
Can it apply to other types (eg geometries) which can be subdivided?
Awesome! I'll look forward to that. :)
> I often hear doubts that anyone wants this.
This was actually a key feature that was greatly desired by a large organization's HR function when they were working to setup a consolidated enterprise data warehouse a decade back.
It would have made it much easier for retention specialists to be able to do things like answer how much a missed retention bonus should have been once the paperwork had been fixed up.
Likewise for the same organization's board for correction of records, and in general any offices that have to make sense of what the world was like for the computer-based records years ago, and how that would change if certain data would have been different years ago.