> Oh, we don't actually delete anything - just deduplicate for search.

Good to hear, but the point stands: so you deduplicate only for the view, not in the source, and thus the source remains contaminated with duplicates (at very least they cost some disk space and increase seek time).

As for the view: so, since you deduplicate the commands - you can't lookup the context (commands executed before & after)! Because each time the now deduplicated command was executed in the past - it had its own context!