Re: temporal support patch

On Tue, 2012-08-21 at 17:07 -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote:
> The fact that it has an unknown sequence number or timestamp for
> purposes of ordering visibility of transactions doesn't mean you
> can't show that it completed in an audit log. In other words, I
> think the needs for a temporal database are significantly different
> from the needs of an auditing system.

...

> I would assume an audit log would have very different needs from
> tracking changes for a temporal database view. It even seems
> possible that you might want to see what people *looked* at, versus
> just changes. You might want to see transactions which were rolled
> back, which are irrelevant for a temporal view. If we're talking
> about an auditing system, we're talking about an almost completely
> different animal from a temporal view of the database.

OK, I think I see what you're saying now. Basically, an audit log means
different things to different people, so I think it confused the issue.
But "temporal" is fairly vague, too. It also seems like there might be a
lot of overlap, depending on how we define those terms.

I am most interested in the topic you brought up about serializability
and system time (transaction time), because it would be a fundamental
piece upon which we can build a lot of these other things (including
what could be called an audit log).

Regards,
Jeff Davis