Temporal data tables in SQL Server

I came across a very interesting post about creating temporal tables in SQL Server and Azure SQL. In the past, it was always a bit of a mission to set up a combination of tables that would track each change to the state of a particular row and allow you to browse through the history easily. 

It turns out that now you can just declare such a table using pure DDL, no triggers, and no stored procedures. It is as simple as the following DDL instruction (taken from Peter's article):

Create Table dbo.SalesOrder   
(    
  ID int Not Null Primary Key Clustered,   
  ...remaining columns...
  StartDate datetime2 GENERATED ALWAYS AS ROW START HIDDEN,  
  EndDate datetime2 GENERATED ALWAYS AS ROW END HIDDEN,  
  PERIOD FOR SYSTEM_TIME (StartDate, EndDate)  
)    
WITH (SYSTEM_VERSIONING = ON 
      (HISTORY_TABLE = dbo.SalesOrderHistorical));

Bear in mind though - you should not implement this functionality for all tables in your database, because you can. Always gather detailed requirements from the users and implement temporal tables where they are needed because temporal tables add additional storage and processing overhead to your database.