davnicwil

This is right. I'm a big fan of this sort of embedded audit metadata wherever it makes sense.

I do wonder when doing stuff like this though, if this really shouldn't be something that the database gives you for free.

I read a few years ago about 'fact based' event stream style databases which store your data as a stream of time ordered ops that can later serve as an audit log, but can be used for even more powerful things such as backups at any point in time, debugging at any point in time, etc.

For practical reasons (i.e. just picking a standard postgres setup to get stuff done) I've never dug into any of these systems or played around with them. Anyone know what the latest and greatest is here? Is there anything I can install on top of postgres to give me this functionality today?

skybrian
I’ve been following the progress of Dolt [1] which is a SQL database that works like git. This would give you modification history in a similar way to git. That’s different from recording when events happened, though (and changing your mind about when they happened), so you’ll still need timestamps for that.

[1] https://github.com/dolthub/dolt