Techment — Site Header

What is Change History

Definition

Change history is the maintained record of how data values have changed over time, capturing previous versions, who changed them, and when, so organisations can audit modifications, analyse trends, and reconstruct the state of data at any earlier point.

« Back to Glossary Index

Preserves prior values so past states can be reconstructed and audited
Records who changed what and when for accountability and compliance
Enables trend analysis on how attributes evolved over time
Supports recovery by revealing exactly what a value was before a bad change

Real World Example

A CRM keeps change history on account records, so when a customer disputes a contract term the team can see the exact prior value, the user who changed it, and the timestamp, resolving the issue with an auditable trail.

FAQs

How is change history different from data lineage?

Change history tracks how a record's values changed over time, while lineage tracks how data flows and transforms between systems.

What is change history used for?

Auditing, compliance, debugging, recovering prior values, and analysing how data has evolved.

How is change history captured?

Through history tables, slowly changing dimensions, audit logs, or versioned table formats that retain previous values.