Is there a common name for the practice of keeping a version number on your data, so that different versions of your program can identify, for example, “current”, “legacy”, and “too-old-to-deal-with” versions of the same type of object?
As discussed here: Strategy for backwards compatibility of persistent storage.
3
Since version control systems handle continuously changing versions of document objects, perhaps their nomenclature is appropriate.
- Subversion: revision
- Git: changeset (or perhaps commit)
In both cases this is metadata associated with the underlying object, and is usually a pointer to a linked list of other pointers representing the history.
So, it would seem that the term you’re looking for is the name given to the “collection of revision history pointers” which would be “revision history”.
When used with databases, the term I run into the most is
(Database) Schema Version Number