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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Just the temporal properties alone make it very useful for anything where it matters like billing, finance, inventory. Else you are in views/schema/indexing hell to do it on top of SQL.

There is some SQL temporal support but it's not great and varies a lot. Also since it's not native to the storage it has a lot of complexity issues under the rug making it not great.

Many financial systems use Event Sourcing (OOP + ORM). I had to suffer this at a previous employer.

See https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/2018-11-12-datomic-even...

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The temporal support seems handy, but time is still going to be really tricky for financial systems. Datomic only covers what the physical state of the database was at a particular time, but there's also the effective legal time (maybe a payment was dated a day before the system actually processed it) as well as requirements to remove data after a period of time (including point in time stuff).

Indeed, it depends a lot on the domain. Datomic only has "technical" database time, and doesn't have any built-in way of modelling domain time. You can set the transaction timestamp manually when you write, but you can't set it to be earlier than the latest transaction that was committed. So, if you want your domain modelling to piggyback on Datomic time travelling, you can only do things like delaying writes for, say, an hour, and hope you have all the data by the time you commit to db.

There's a bitemporal Datomic-like database from JUXT that does exactly that, I believe https://www.xtdb.com

> Just the temporal properties alone make it very useful for anything where it matters like billing, finance, inventory.

you can easily create datamodel to have this in SQL dbs: create table transaction_history(..., execution_time timestamp);

This is not an answer, it's the beginning of a question. Yes sure, we know `create table` and we know it's a good idea to record the execution timestamp. What exactly do you put in the place of the three dots?

Fyi, Datomic lets you look at the entire database at any point in time, as an immutable value. Also, you can annotate transactions with metadata, and query for "which tx wrote this specific value for this row/column" and look at custom metadata you added to the tx to reason about your system. Doing all of that in SQL is not trivial, to say the least.

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