Business context

Querying data in its current state is the most common data catalog use case, but there are times when it is necessary to compare previous versions of datasets, metadata, and lineage. data.world SQL and SPARQL Time Travel allows customers to view changes across metadata and data and even query historical data sources. 

Capabilities

The new feature provides granular insight into audit trails and analysis of data that is snapshotted across time. You can search both ingested data sources and Snowflake virtual tables for previous states of data. Being able to analyze previous versions of a dataset, even simultaneously with the current version of a dataset, enables flexible analysis across various time scales – review data month-over-month, year-over-year, etc.

In data.world, your metadata is also data and therefore fully queryable and reportable. You can compare previous versions of your metadata with current versions in order to understand how your systems and schemas are changing. See new columns, new column names, sensitive data that recently appeared in a field that wasn't there previously, and much more.

Supported operations include previous version, number of versions back (tip-N), specific timestamp, and offset.

Example: SQL Time Travel Query

Example: SPARQL Time Travel Query