In particular, you can enforce the obvious business rule, that there is no objectID with overlapping validRanges (as long as you have the btree_gist extension):
CREATE EXTENSION btree_gist;
CREATE TABLE objects (
objectID uuid,
versionID uuid,
validRange tsrange,
objectData text,
EXCLUDE USING GIST(objectID WITH =, validRange WITH &&)
I was wondering what the current thinking is on ways to model versioning in Postgres.
The overall premise is that the latest version is the current version unless a rollback has occurred, in which case versions get tracked from the rollback point (forking ?).
My initial naïve starting point is something along the lines of :
This obviously creates a fool-proof answer to "latest version is the current version" because its a simple case of an "where objectID=x order by versionTS desc limit 1" query. However it clearly doesn't cover the rollback to prior scenarios.
I then though about adding a simple "versionActive boolean".
But the problem with that is it needs hand-holding somewhere because there can only be one active version and so it would introduce the need for a "active switch" script somewhere that activated the desired version and deactivated the others. It also perhaps is not the right way to deal with tracking of changes post-rollback.
How have others approached the problem ?
N.B. If it makes any difference, I'm dealing with a 12.5 install here, but this could easily be pushed up to 13 if there are benefits.