As Clemens said, the typical use is that you want to be able to effectively roll back to a given point in time. Thus references to the record aren't to a specific rowid identifier but a sort of unique identifier (sort of unique, as it represents the record over all time, so more than one row has that id) What I often do is add two fields to each record, one being the 'creation' stamp for this record, for when this version was created, and a second stamp for when it was deleted or updated. This allows joins to directly specify which historic record to find, or use a null (or infinite future depending on what the value used for the second time stamp for current is), If the current record uses some unique rowid as a key, how do you mark the historical record that matches it? Now there is an alternate method, similar to what you describe, where you set up a second history table, and you move the historical records to it, adding versioning information. This keeps the 'main' tables smaller and faster, but doesn't allow as easy of querying the history of a record,