How to model data planning

I want to build a data model which supports:

1. Data history - store every change of data. This is not a problem: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Java_P开发者_如何转开发ersistence/Advanced_Topics#History

2. Data planning - user should be able to prepare a record with validity sometime in the future (for example, I know that customer name changes from May so I prepare record with validity of 1st of May).

How can I do point 2?

How can I do these things together (points 1 & 2)

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If you really need point 2 - and I would think very hard about this, because in my experience users will never use it, and you will be spending a lot of effort to support something no one will ever use - anyway, if you really need it, then:

Make no changes at all directly in the table. All changes go through history.

Behind the scenes, periodically you will run a batch updater. This goes through history, finds all unapplied changes (set a status flag in the history to be able to rapidly find them), and applies them, and it checks the date to make sure it is time to apply the change.

You are going to have to deal with merges. What if the user says: In one month my name changes. Then goes in a and changes their name effective today. You have a conflict. How do you resolve it? You can either prevent any immediate changes, until past ones are done (or at least all new changes have a date after the last unapplied one). Or you can change it now, and change it again in a month.

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I think storing the change of data is handled in the background, Look into data warehousing and slowly changing dimensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_changing_dimension in a Stored Procedure to handle new records and predecessors of those new records which will be known as "expired records". Once you allowed for SCD it's quite easy to find those historic expired records that you're after.