Techniques for history enabling a table in a database system so that past versions of rows of the history-enabled table are available for temporal querying. The table is history enabled by adding a start time column to the table and creating a history table for the history-enabled table. The history table's rows are copies of rows of the history-enabled table that have changed and include start time and end time fields whose values indicate a period in which the history table's row was in the history-enabled table. Temporal queries are performed on a view which is the union of the history-enabled table and the history table. The temporal queries are speeded up by period of time indexes in which the leaves are grouped based on time period size, identifiers are assigned to the groups, and the keys of the index include the group identifiers.