Abstract. Being able to activate triggers at timepoints reached or after time intervals elapsed has been acknowledged by many authors as a valuable functionality of a DBMS. Recently, the interest in time-based triggers has been renewed in the context of data stream monitoring. However, up till now SQL triggers react to data changes only, even though research proposals and prototypes have been supporting several other event types, in particular time-based ones, since long. We therefore propose a seamless extension of the SQL trigger concept by time-based triggers, focussing on semantic issues arising from such an extension.