Techniques for history enabling a table in a database system so that past versions of rows of the history-enabled table are available for temporal querying. The table is history enabled by adding a start time column to the table and creating a history table for the history-enabled table. The start time field's value in a row of the history-enabled table indicates when the contents of the row last changed. The rows of the history table are copies of rows of the history-enabled table that have been deleted or updated. The rows include end time fields whose values indicate when the row was updated or deleted. A history table's row thus indicates a period in which the history table's row was in the history-enabled table. Temporal queries are performed on a view which is the union of the history-enabled table and the history table.