Temporal tables are a database feature that automatically records the full history of row states over time, enabling time-travel queries. While they share some surface similarities with Event Sourcing — such as audit trails and historical state retrieval — they differ fundamentally. Temporal tables store state snapshots without business context, making it impossible to know what caused a change or correlate changes across multiple tables. Event Sourcing captures business events with intent and causality, enables event-driven workflows, and provides system-wide ordering guarantees. Temporal tables are a pragmatic, lower-effort option for basic auditing but are not a true alternative to Event Sourcing. Support exists in MSSQL 2016+, MariaDB, and via a Postgres plugin.
