A temporal database management system (DBMS) is a DBMS that provides built-in support for the time dimension, including special facilities for storing, querying, and updating data with respect to time. A temporal DBMS can distinguish between historical data, current data, and data that will be in effect in the future.
The intent of a temporal database management system is to reason with time.
A temporal DBMS provides a temporal version of SQL, including enhancements to the data definition language (DDL), constraint specifications and their enforcements, data types, data manipulation language (DML), and query language for temporal tables.