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Comment by augustl | Hacker News Reader

This is why I don't understand why Datomic isn't more popular. Pretty much every system I've worked on never needed to scale past 100s of writes per second due to hard limits on the system (internal backoffice stuff, fundamenally scoped/shardable to defined regions, etc etc). And since Datomic is built with that in mind, you get the trade-off of full history, first class transactions and being able to query for things like "who changes this attribute to its current value, when, and why" is such as super power!

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Too niche of a technology, tied to clojure, not open source and very slow(doesn't matter for most internal apps though). For many, it's better to do the tedious thing here and there with postgres. SQL also has strong grip on databases and if you look at it the other way around, postgres has lots of features that datomic lacks, with datomic you almost always need a secondary database.

It’s hard to get adoption for expensive toys.

I think Datomic is neat, and I’d like to use it, but it is prohibitively expensive for a personal or hobby project. Personal projects are where I get excited about tech, and when I’m excited I’m more likely to adopt it in my day job.

They’re really shooting themselves in the foot by not having a one-click install free tier or a self hosted option.

You may want to look into XTDB then. Not quite the same as Datomic, but they share many similarities. It's free and open-source.

Neat, thanks!

Personally looking at their pricing since it is so tied to AWS it is completely non-transparent how much it's going to cost us now or in the future.

I really like the concept of datomic though.

In the past I've used MSSQL's Temporal Tables (also called System-Versioned Tables) to implement this kind of functionality. This also gets you, for free, Type 2 SCD functionality for OLAP-style queries.

I can't wait until Postgres has this kind of functionality baked in. It's such a nice feature.

You likely know that there is an extension for PG that does this.

For me it is simply that isn't open source (at least last I checked.)

Datomic is great but i think its missing some features that many enterprises need (access control and a query planner). Also it seems to be mostly built for DynamoDB/AWS.

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