Yes. In practice, the typical "UPDATE" looks like this: 1. create a "hole" in the current transaction space's valid space (through expirations of records in tr

Yes. In practice, the typical "UPDATE" looks like this: 1. create a "hole" in the current transaction space's valid space (through expirations of records in transaction time, valid time). 2. insert the new version at (transaction_period=(now, inf), valid_period=(effective_date, inf)). It sounds complicated, and it sometimes is, but in practice most of the hard work (specifically around transaction periods) is performed for you by triggers. Usually you only have to think about valid periods, as a developer, which is easier to wrap your mind around. The unfortunate thing is that there aren't a lot of very straightforward open source implementations of bitemporal triggers. The ones that exist are mostly designed to be theoretically sound and feature-complete, rather than usable. At my company, we have our own implementation that has slowly grown over the years. It's about 500 lines of SQL triggers, and maybe 2k lines of library code in Python/Go to make the ergonomics a little bit easier on the developer.