So, the fully fleshed out form of this in databases is usually called Bitemporality. The official SQL standard has included this for some years now, but it's no

So, the fully fleshed out form of this in databases is usually called Bitemporality. The official SQL standard has included this for some years now, but it's not widely implemented by databases. An intuitive way to think of bitemporality is it's like MVCC, but with 4 timestamps per row version. One pair describes a range of time in "outside" or "valid" time, ie whatever semantic domain the database is modeling, the other pair describes a range of "system" time, which is when this record was present in the database. This lets you capture and reason about the distinction between when a fact the database models was true in the real world, and when the database was updated to reflect this fact (some people call this "as of" vs "as at"... the terms here aren't fully settled but the basic distinction is). So you can revise history, do complex time travel queries, all sorts of stuff. It's a very useful model that directly aligns with what sort of questions businesses need to answer in the context of a court case or revising their ground source of truth due to past bug or error. The downside is your database balloons with row versions, and many queries become far more complicated, perhaps needing addition joins, etc. Also from the perspective of database implementors there's a ton more complexity in the code. So that's why it's not widely supported despite the standard. There's also a niche of databases built around this model from the ground up, usually based on Datalog instead of SQL. There's also overlapping work with RDF and Semantic Web thinking (as awry as all that went). In practice how most organizations address this is operationally, by keeping generational and incremental backups that let them restore previous database states as needed. Though as the original post we're here for proves, that kind of operational solution can bite back hard when it goes wrong.