SQL Server 2016 – Will Temporal Tables Be Included in Standard Edition?

The new version of SQL Server 2016 wil support so called Temporal Tables.

I can't find any documentation that would say whether this feature would be Enterprise-only or available in Standard edition as well.

On the one hand, Temporal Table Considerations and Limitations suggests it will be Enterprise-only:

• By default, the history table is PAGE compressed.
• An optimal indexing strategy will include a clustered columnstore index […] The default history table has a clustered rowstore index

As far as I know, data compression is an Enterprise-only feature, but technically Standard edition could create a non-compressed history table.

Columnstore index is an Enterprise-only feature, but by default it will create a rowstore index, so there is still hope.

On the other hand, documentation for sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features is the same for 2014 and 2016 and the list of Enterprise features doesn't have Temporal Tables (maybe the documentation is not updated yet?).

• Does anyone know, maybe unofficially, what is the likely variant?
• If someone has the latest 2016 RC installed, could they tell us what sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features returns if the database has Temporal Tables?

If there is a good chance that this feature will be included in Standard Edition, I could wait for half a year until the release of 2016 before migrating my 2008 database to the latest version. If there is no hope, I would migrate it to 2014. If I migrate to 2014 it will likely stay on this version for the next 10 years.

Regarding putting this question on hold:

I don't want an "opinion-based" answer to this question, I'd like to know the facts. I had hoped that this kind of information would have been published somewhere, and I just didn't know where to look. For example, until today I didn't know about sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features.

The questions could be adjusted to:

• How and when are SKU decisions made?
• How would one know that decision was made?
• If not for this version, how was it done for previous versions?
• Is this kind of information published when the RTM version is released or earlier?

If a hard fact is not known (the decision is not made yet and even SQL Server developers don't know), an educated guess would be also great, for example, based on how this decision was made in previous versions.