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Comment by augustl | Hacker News Reader

I've used Datomic from both Kotin and Groovy (!)

I presented on Datomic at KotlinConf too, with some live coding starting around the 31 minute mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hicQvxdKvnc

You probably need to be on the JVM, as the peer library (i.e. the "good one", where you embed the full query engine and data fetching directly into your business logic) is so far only implemented for the JVM.

I suppose 10+ years of weird license models and a hefty price tag haven't helped. Datomic turned free (but still proprietary) in 2023 though. But why Datomic isn't more widely adopted is a huge mystery to me...

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> But why Datomic isn't more widely adopted is a huge mystery to me...

I've been hearing about Datomic on and off over the years, and I never saw a clear answer to the simple question: what is it? What does it do?

Instead I saw it most often mentioned as an example of a successful Clojure project, and now that's how I think of it. Seems like poor marketing/branding if there ever was intentional attempt at it.

> I've been hearing about Datomic on and off over the years, and I never saw a clear answer to the simple question: what is it? What does it do?

I'm guessing most people, like me, first heard about both Clojure and Datomic from one of Hickey's famous talks about software development. Coming from one of those, I guess it's a bit easier to understand what the various concepts and words mean from Datomic's website for example.

I guess the easiest way to put it: Datomic is a append-only (deletions via "retraction" records) database that lets you query through time (also called "Bitemporal modeling" with fancier words).

The features/benefits page I think is pretty clear (https://www.datomic.com/benefits.html) but again, might just be my familiarity speaking.

> that lets you query through time (also called "Bitemporal modeling" with fancier words)

Datomic is actually only 'uni-temporal', it provides a database-wide, immutable "system time" (aka "transaction time") versioning + very effective as-of querying. This naturally falls out of the "Epochal Time Model" (see Deconstructing the Database, 2012). However there is no particular built-in support for any further mutable time dimension, see: https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/2017-07-08-Datomic-this...

System-time is still very powerful though. The way I think of the difference is: system-time versioning is mainly useful for debugging and auditing (and of course for the horizontal read scaling), whereas valid-time versioning is useful for timestamp-based reporting (or other forms of in-application time-travel and modelling 'truth' in business data) where the system-time timestamps are not the timestamps end users are directly interested in, see: https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/eventual-business-consisten...

I am aware of the basics but it's hard to find details on "why not Postgres" or other standard solution for basically event sourcing.

Event sourcing is usually something you'd have to implement yourself, it's "just" a pattern.

While Datomic et al gives you a bunch of useful features out-of-the-box.

Yes, you can build a query system that allows you to see data at specific points of time with event sourcing, but you likely have to implement that yourself. Compared to temporal databases where it's just (usually) a parameter you pass together with your query.

Thanks. I’ll check out the video.

At this point I’m pretty addicted to BEAM and the Elixir ecosystem though. (And LiveView!).

I doubt it's still the case, but once upon a time Riak (written primarily in Erlang) was one of the preferred storage backends for Datomic.

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