Architecture that eliminates the need for on-disk full backups of data retaining only changes that have occurred, in a separate table. Thus, the architecture provides for incremental recovery of incremental changes in a relational database (e.g., SQL). The architecture provides improved recovery time and recovery point objectives. By using the incremental capture of changed data (e.g., in an XML format), the capability is provided to capture schema changes, query the incremental change data and efficiently restore user data to an earlier point-in-time state. Changes (e.g., insert, update and delete operations) are tracked (e.g., continuously) by a set of triggers and the incrementally captured changed rows are inserted in a data capture table (a differential change “delta” table) in a human-readable format (e.g., XML). Rollback is also provided.