DB2 Time Travel Query

Easily analyze historical trends and predict future demand

It is expensive and technically complex for businesses to develop their own infrastructure for temporal data management, such as additional tables, triggers, and application logic. Time Travel Query makes your database time-aware and keeps a history of your data changes by using temporal tables. You can travel to the past and the future, and query your data as it appeared at different points in time without having to build, maintain, and administer a complex temporal infrastructure.

Time Travel Query helps you:

  • Make your existing DB2 tables time-aware easily
  • Provide a cost-effective means to resolve auditing and compliance issues
  • Achieve full traceability of backdated corrections through the use of bitemporal tables
  • Lower cost with efficient SQL coding of complex time-focused operations to implement and maintain time-aware applications
  • Shorten application development time by allowing DBAs to use an existing SQL application and run it across different time periods
  • Reduce your time to deployment through an inexpensive and easy to maintain time-focused data support infrastructure
  • Create a time-based warehouse at low cost without additional application logic

For example, a database can store the history of a table (deleted rows or the original values of rows that have been updated) so you can query the past state of your data. You can also assign a date range to a row of data to indicate when it is deemed to be valid by your application or business rules. For many businesses there are important reasons to preserve the history of data changes. Without this capability in the database, it is expensive and complex for businesses to maintain audit trails for regulatory compliance.

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