As far as I know, there are not tables to track things like death*, or records-over-time. The database represents the state of the world right now. It is not "4 dimensional" if you get what I mean.
Transaction data can be archived in such a way that you can rewind the current state of the database without actually taking a bunch of full copies of the database, as long as they are rolled back in a LIFO manner.
* Tracking a corpse object does not equal tracking a death
EDIT:
For more info about proper schema design w.r.t. foreign keys, etc, read up on database normalization. It's good to have a source of truth in relational databases and have other tables refer to that, rather than copy in such a way as to allow inconsistencies to crop up.
The archiving part, as I described it, is generally referred to as data logging. It does track the DB but the core tables should not really know/care they are being tracked.
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Jorg Shaman
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