How to create a point in time architecture in MySQL

Question

I read this article on building a point in time architecture for your database. It looks to me as an elegant solution, but the article is allready from some time ago (2007). I was wondering: 1. Are there any other methods to solve this? 2. What are the pro's and con's of this and other methods? 3. Is there a mysql implementation available for these methods that I can re-use?

Answer 1

I just skimmed the article, but it looks like the author's reinventing the bi-temporal database wheel. I'm not confident he did a good job of it, but I didn't read it closely.

Before you get too deep into this, take some time to skim Richard Snodgrass's old book Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL. It's available as a PDF from his web page.

I think MySQL's lack of support for CHECK constraints and peculiar implementation of GROUP BY will make his approach hard to implement. If you have freedom of choice, PostgreSQL might be a better platform for this.