Keeping page changes history. A bit like SO does for revisions

Question

I have a CMS system that stores data across tables like this:

Entries Table
+----+-------+------+--------+--------+
| id | title | text | index1 | index2 |
+         


        

Answer 1

For one of our projects we went the following way:

Entries Table
+----+-----------+---------+
| id | date_from | date_to |
+----+--------_--+---------+

EntryProperties Table
+----------+-----------+-------+------+--------+--------+
| entry_id | date_from | title | text | index1 | index2 |
+----------+-----------+-------+------+--------+--------+

Pretty much complicated, still allows to keep track of full object's lifecycle. So for querying active entities we were going for:

SELECT 
entry_id, title, text, index1, index2
FROM
Entities INNER JOIN EntityProperties
ON Entities.id = EntityProperties.entity_id
AND Entities.date_to IS NULL
AND EntityProperties.date_to IS NULL

The only concern was for a situation with entity being removed (so we put a date_to there) and then restored by admin. Using given scheme there's no way to track such kind of tricks.

Overall downside of any attempt like that is obvious - you've to write tons of TSQL where non-versioned DBs will go for something like select A join B.