On one or my current projects, the client wants to know the state of a table at any point in time.  Until now, I have always heard this concept referred to as "effective dating" a table meaning date columns have been added to the table to represent the EffectiveDate and ExpirationDate for the current row.  While doing some research, I found some work by Richard Snodgrass that refers to this as "temporal" design.

Rick's book, called Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications using SQL, is extremely detailed in analyzing different implementations and providing solutions to many common scenarios.  This book also discusses how to implement each strategy in many different rdbms systems such as (Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle).

Without this reference, I surely would have encountered some of the problems outlined in this book.  After reading this book, I now understand the fragile areas of implementing temporal database tables.