The motivation for homogeneity arises from the fact that no timeslices of a homogeneous relation produce null values. Therefore a homogeneous relational model is the temporal counterpart of the snapshot relational model without nulls. Certain data models assume temporal homogeneity. Models that employ tuple timestamping rather than attribute value timestamping are necessarily temporally homogeneous—only temporally homogeneous relations are possible.
In general, using simply ``homogeneous'' without ``temporal'' as qualifier may cause ambiguity because the unrelated notion of homogeneity exists also in distributed databases (-E5).