Occasionally, a need arises to see an earlier version of the data. For example, an analysis from a publication may need to be revisited, and the user may need to use the data as it appeared at the time of publication rather than the data as it appears today. However, for a variety of reasons, reconstructing earlier "versions" of data in Babase can be difficult or even impossible. To address this problem, beginning with Babase 5.0 all tables became "temporal" tables.

A temporal table is one where all inserts, updates, and deletes to the table are recorded with a timestamp, and earlier versions of the data remain accessible for recall. This allows the user to query a table for its data "as of" a specified date, if desired.