Blog post OP here. No, we are not the first SQL vendor to provide this. And many other non-SQL databases also have this feature. Performance is faster than ot

Blog post OP here. No, we are not the first SQL vendor to provide this. And many other non-SQL databases also have this feature. Performance is faster than other reads, in general, because of less risk of transaction retries. Columns can come and go, and change types, and that is all handled correctly. If a column reappears as a different type, it will work correctly. This is because we also version the table schemas each time they change, so we can always fetch the correct schema when doing a time-travel query.