A few developers approached me and asked for the easiest way to add historization to a certain table containing master data. As someone familiar with system versioned tables in the context of SQL 2011, SQL-Server (as standard feature) and PostgreSQL (as proposal), I was decently sure that Oracle would support that standard feature.
However, after reading and checking the whole day, I cannot find any references to actual SYSTEM VERSIONED tables. For reference, here's what the Wikipedia says about the standard and Oracles implementation:
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Definition of system-versioned tables (elsewhere called transaction time tables), using the PERIOD FOR SYSTEM_TIME annotation and WITH SYSTEM VERSIONING modifier. System time periods are maintained automatically. Constraints for system-versioned tables are not required to be temporal and are only enforced on current rows
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Oracle Oracle 12c supports temporal functionality in compliance with SQL:2011.[9] Versions 10g and 11g implement the time-sliced queries in what they call Flashback Queries, using the alternative syntax AS OF TIMESTAMP.[10] Notably both of Oracle's implementations depend on the database transaction log and so only allow temporal queries against recent changes which are still being retained for backup.
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However, even following the referenced link I cannot find a single reference that shows how to get Oracle to version the rows for me. All examples reference only manual updates for the validity from and to columns.
I think I could implement something like SCD2 from Data Warehousing, but that's just a development pattern with no reference how the validity is actually updated. I would really like an easy solution for the developers, as doing the updates for the validity manually is error prone (overlapping is a factor) and more work than I think is necessary.
Is there really no system versioning in Oracle for what the SQL 2011 standard describes?