Databases: Are We There Yet? – Spasov [video]

Past/present/future timeline made me go to... Conway's Law.

Thinking (not a novel thought) aloud... it's a new angle for me.

70s style data processing was place-oriented, as in, literally a place (/the/ central computer /building/) gated by mainframe mages.

The question of /sharing data multilaterally between cooperating data systems/ did not exist. There was only the central computer. People put data (punch cards, tapes, print-outs, paper receipts, phone calls) in the building and carried answers out of it (also as punch cards, tapes, print-outs, paper receipts, phone calls). But they would only ever talk to the same computer.

As organisations grew more interconnected, organisational silos developed around the same central-store information structure that was now embedded inside the organisation, having been a very successful model of information management in 70s style organisations, through then 90s (and severally, today too).

Simulacra <> Simulation.

The property ownership assumption baked into database engines therefore, would have been /non-sharing of schema/, not really non-sharing of data (data was being schlepped around using sneakernets).

And for this very reason, trying to build "local first" stuff around central-store data systems is ill-fated to break down, because that's a "shared-everything" world by default, and so aspects of attribution, ownership, control, interpreting/lensing/parsing/slicing etc. (somehow) need to flow along with the information. Turning the database inside-out alone is not enough.

I guess I'm saying... Ted Nelson will eventually have the last laugh.

Interesting idea, and it does fit Datomic really well.

Here's the project the presenter is working on:

https://github.com/saberstack/zsxf