The Envers project aims to enable easy versioning of persistent JPA classes. All that you have to do is annotate your persistent class or some of its properties, that you want to version, with @Versioned. For each versioned entity, a table will be created, which will hold the history of changes made to the entity. You can then retrieve and query historical data without much effort.

Similarly to Subversion, the library has a concept of revisions. Basically, one transaction commit is one revision (unless the transaction didn't modify any versioned entities). As the revisions are global, having a revision number, you can query for various entities at that revision, retrieving a (partial) view of the database at that revision.