Comment by stuarthalloway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stuarthalloway | Hacker News Reader

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As Jepsen confirmed, Datomic’s mechanisms for enforcing invariants work as designed. What does this mean practically for users? Consider the following transactional pseudo-data:

[

[Stu favorite-number 41]

;; maybe more stuff

[Stu favorite-number 42]

]

An operational reading of this data would be that early in the transaction I liked 41, and that later in the transaction I liked 42. Observers after the end of the transaction would hopefully see only that I liked 42, and we would have to worry about the conditions under which observers might see that 41.

This operational reading of intra-transaction semantics is typical of many databases, but it presumes the existence of multiple time points inside a transaction, which Datomic neither has nor wants — we quite like not worrying about what happened “in the middle of” a transaction. All facts in a transaction take place at the same point in time, so in Datomic this transaction states that I started liking both numbers simultaneously.

If you incorrectly read Datomic transactions as composed of multiple operations, you can of course find all kinds of “invariant anomalies”. Conversely, you can find “invariant anomalies” in SQL by incorrectly imposing Datomic’s model on SQL transactions. Such potential misreadings emphasize the need for good documentation. To that end, we have worked with Jepsen to enhance our documentation [1], tightening up casual language in the hopes of preventing misconceptions. We also added a tech note [2] addressing this particular misconception directly.

[1] https://docs.datomic.com/transactions/transactions.html#tran...

[2] https://docs.datomic.com/tech-notes/comparison-with-updating...

To build on this, Datomic includes a pre-commit conflict check that would prevent this particular example from committing at all: it detects that there are two incompatible assertions for the same entity/attribute pair, and rejects the transaction. We think this conflict check likely prevents many users from actually hitting this issue in production.

The issue we discuss in the report only occurs when the transaction expands to non-conflicting datoms--for instance:

[Stu favorite-number 41]

[Stu hates-all-numbers-and-has-no-favorite true]

These entity/attribute pairs are disjoint, so the conflict checker allows the transaction to commit, producing a record which is in a logically inconsistent state!

On the documentation front--Datomic users could be forgiven for thinking of the elements of transactions as "operations", since Datomic's docs called them both "operations" and "statements". ;-)

Mea culpa on the docs, mea culpa. Better now [1].

In order for user code to impose invariants over the entire transaction, it must have access to the entire transaction. Entity predicates have such access (they are passed the after db, which includes the pending transaction and all other transactions to boot). Transaction functions are unsuitable, as they have access only to the before db. [2]

Use entity predicates for arbitrary functional validations of the entire transaction.

[1] https://docs.datomic.com/transactions/transactions.html#tran...

[2] https://docs.datomic.com/transactions/transaction-functions....

Somewhat unrelated ad docs: It appears that "Query" opens a deadlink

Thanks for the report! just fixed the link.

The man the myth the legend himself. I haven't ceased to be awed by how often the relevant person shows up in the HN comment section.

Loved your talks.

Datomic transactions are not “operations to perform”, they are a set of novel facts to incorporate at a point in time.

Just like a git commit describes a set of modifications, do you or should you want to care about which order or how the adds, updates, and deletes occur in a single git commit? OMG no, that sounds awful.

The really unusual thing is that developers expect intra-transaction ordering to be a thing they accept from any other database. OMG, that sounds awful, how do you live like that.

Nested transactions or savepoints also exist in other systems

Do developers not expect intra-transaction ordering from within a transaction?

It depends on the previous experience of said developers, and such expectation varies widely.

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