Comments - Best practice for open application time period
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Application time periods come from SQL:2011 standard with rather constrains the implementation.
Even documents related to the standard like this article tend to use similar sentinel dates.
The date datatype supports up to 9999-12-31 which should support the current timelines of employment (for now). A date/datetime value that represents the equivalent of infinity which might have some merit as a feature request especially if there's a standard that can be referenced or an existing SQL implementation.
Start date columns can take a default value of now (or any of its aliases).