Thank you to everyone here saying they are excited about it. I often hear doubts that anyone wants this. Perhaps that's why vendors have been so slow to add it. And thank you 'bonesmoses for writing about it!

We are still missing system time, but if no one else wants to work on it, I hope to tackle that soon.

I have a lot of other ideas for improvement beyond SQL:2011, too. Here is a talk I gave last month about my personal roadmap:

https://illuminatedcomputing.com/pages/pgconf2026-temporal-r...

I've also been vibecoding a lisp REPL to play with the algebra of temporal relational operators (important for the planner): https://github.com/pjungwir/relsim

That overlaps with my attempt to write implementations for temporal semi/anti/outer-join and other relops: https://github.com/pjungwir/temporal_ops

If anyone has comments about what you'd like to see, I'm happy for feedback!

Let’s say for 2026 you have it at 7.25% and you entered that into the system ahead of time (say December 2025). Today, June 12 you learn that it should have been 7.35%. It would be incorrect to say that the rate changed today: it was 7.35% since January 1. But you also don’t want to lose the fact that all your invoices have been generated using the wrong rate because if you go to recalculate them you will get a different answer.

In this case what you do is create version 2 of the rate in your database with the same time period but the correct rate. This would allow your other database objects to reference either version 1 or 2 and to even recalculate all the objects that reference version 1 to now reference version 2 such that you can get line item corrections and figure out what to do about them.

It is cumbersome to use but for the specific use case of modeling real world laws that are not available as machine-readable info it is the best option I came up with.

One thing I'm wondering about is the performance of temporal tables for the common case, when you only query current rows. When you manually version tables, one strategy is to have a second table that contains archived versions. So your main table only has the current rows, avoiding a performance hit for having many versions per entry. Is there a way to do this with temporal tables? For example partitioning between active and old rows?

It never came to pass when we used Oracle, maybe now with Postgres I will finally have a chance at it.

This is WAY easier.

And really, ranges are an amazing substrate for this. I've had to do this by hand in a ... less featuresome ... SQL-speaking DB and it was clunky and performed fairly unimpressively.

This question has been answerable in Dolt for years now.

See https://dancol.org/dctv/index.xml

I still think there's a lot of value in first-class syntax for time queries. Splitting ranges like Postgres 19 does is a good first step, but there's also a lot of power in broadcasting over these ranges, combining them in various ways, and storing multiple, independent ranges in a single table.

Ignore the bit about active development: these days, it'd take more sense to add the operators I describe to Postgres and DuckDB than to make a numpy-based engine just to host the analysis. This work predates DuckDB, and it's reassuring that DuckDB (and now Postgres) are thinking along similar lines.

I'm also glad that in the intervening years "data lake"-style analysis has become more prominent. My ideal data processing pipeline consists of sourcing from raw data and pipelining views all the way to human-meaningful outputs. Materialization, if it occurs, is just an optimization.