>I wish this were a thing I could cheaply turn on and off on SQL columns.
You can turn it on and off for whole tables in systems that have decided to implement SQL:2011 such as MSSQL, Oracle, MariaDB, etc. and then issue time travel queries to see what the state of the database was at any given point in time.
You can turn it on and off for whole tables in systems that have decided to implement SQL:2011 such as MSSQL, Oracle, MariaDB, etc. and then issue time travel queries to see what the state of the database was at any given point in time.
Keyword here is "Temporal Table".