Tom Kyte is Excited!

Tom Kyte is working on a series of articles about the new features in Oracle 12c/18c (cloud).  One of the most exciting?  Timeline-based queries.  Tom says:

Oracle 9i exposed flashback query to developers for the first time.  The ability to flashback query dates back to version 4 however (it just wasn't exposed).  Every time you run a query in Oracle it is in fact a flashback query - it is what multi-versioning is all about.

What does that mean for you?  That means you can take any date range-based query and have the range checks automatically computed by SQL*Plus.  This transforms a nasty query like this:

SELECT USERNAME, FULLNAME
FROM USER_ACCOUNT_HISTORY
WHERE CREATED_DATE >= SYSDATE - 7
AND (TERMINATED_DATE IS NULL OR TERMINATED_DATE >= SYSDATE - 7);

To a nice, clean:

SELECT USERNAME, FULLNAME
FROM USER_ACCOUNT_HISTORY
AS OF PERIOD FOR VALID SYSDATE - 7;

Not that these queries are the best example, but hopefully you can come up with your own.  Please feel free to share, we always love comments here.