System-versioned tables are primarily intended for tracking historical data changes. Queries on system-versioned tables often tend to be concerned with retrieving table content as of a given point in time, or between any two given points in time. As you saw, Microsoft has implemented them according to the SQL:2011 standard, which means that two physical tables exist: a table with actual data and a history table. In order to simplify queries against temporal tables, the SQL:2011 standard introduced a new SQL clause, FOR SYSTEM_TIME. In addition to it, some new temporal-specific sub-clauses have been added too. SQL Server 2017 has not only implemented these extensions, but added two more extensions. ...
Querying temporal data in SQL Server 2017
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