wtf is scdb?

SCDB is an R package that helps you maintain databases where the underlying data changes over time. The core benefit is tracking "slowly changing dimensions", a concept from data warehousing that means when a record changes (like a customer moving to a new address or a product getting a price update), you keep the old version and the new one, each with a time range showing when it was valid. Instead of overwriting the old data and losing history, you end up with a full record of how things looked at any point in the past. The package implements what's called "type-2 history," a standard approach where each row gets a validity window, a start date and end date indicating when that version of the data was current. When new data arrives, expired rows get closed off and new rows are inserted. SCDB also bundles some quality-of-life helpers for working with SQL databases from within R, reducing the boilerplate you'd normally write. This would be useful for analysts, data engineers, or researchers working in R who need to maintain a database that preserves change history. A concrete example: if you work at a health organization tracking patient or population records where attributes shift over time, you'd want to know what someone's status was last year versus today, not just the current state. The package is published on CRAN (the main R package repository) and comes from Statens Serum Institut, Denmark's public health institute. The README is fairly sparse and points to vignettes for actual usage examples and deeper explanation of the slowly changing dimension concept. If you're comfortable in R and need historical tracking in your database workflows, that's where you'd start.