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Comment by ilikehurdles | Hacker News Reader

Datomic is, at its core, an event sourced datastore, and it works really well. I don’t think event sourcing is something that should be solved in application space — you wouldn’t write a database from scratch for your products yet implementing an in-house event sourcing system is for some reason more acceptable.

All of these stories of failure are stories of teams bandaiding event sourcing on top of other databases not optimized for the usecase.

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I was thinking about Datomic when I read this, and yet came to exactly the opposite conclusion :)

Datomic may be something like 'event sourcing' internally, but it works so well because it abstracts and hides the naked overreach that the article pounds against.

Datomic users think of it as a DB, not a stream of events. So I don't think that Datomic users are following the 'event sourcing' model.

Fair point... but, events in the style of "User address changed" are very repetitive, wasteful, fragile etc.

So stopping seeing user-address-change as (primarily) an event is a win. One always can fall back later to perceiving user-address-change as an event.

For "real" events (e.g. "Transaction fraud detected") possibly I wouldn't use Datomic at all even if it was my primary DB. There are more suitable pub-sub systems.

And that results in a neat separation of concerns: data changes in one store, actual business-valuable events in the other.

Datomic: Event Sourcing without the hassle https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/2018-11-12-datomic-even...

I'm using Datomic in a production environment and the ergonomics of development so far have been extremely nice. Would definitely recommend.

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