I agree! Vertica's temporal capabilities are marvelous and the engineers who worked on the planner optimizations for the time extensions are brilliant.

There are of course trade-offs to the approach Vertica takes -- look at StreamBase for a very different take on the problem, another Stonebraker project.

Any of course historians represent yet another take, optimized for point-in time queries that are native and don't need the processing extensions Vertica uses.