Things Databases don't do – but should

I love a lot of the feature ideas: composable query language (as long as the DB also supports sql) would be great, soft delete would be great too.

For the more complex features, as a platform-phobic engineer, I find I gravitate towards composable solutions and am happy to re-build unsupported features on top of simple tools because I'm scared of getting trapped in a platform that my needs eventually outgrow. It's great if platform creators are proactive about providing some escape hatches or some modularity so its easy to continue on their platform while also adding in features they lack or aren't a fit for my system.

Related to that, I feel platforms have a higher cost to vet prior to adoption than a single purpose solution. This is at odds with most startup engineering work cycles where you need to get something done _today_ for a specific problem and you plan to grow your understanding of the problem & system incrementally over time. I'm not sure how any software/database platform can overcome this problem.

Datomic is not a traditional database. It implements many of these features