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Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

datomic.com

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Re: Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

#51

Post by edwardw »

drcode wrote: post #42
vdm wrote: post #11

Webdevs will be all over this when the Peer runs on Javascript runtimes. Who's taking bets that it's written in Clojurescript?

I'm pretty sure the whole thing is built on the JVM, but I agree with you that having a peer run inside a js browser app via clojurescript would be a logical next step. (and arguably really useful)

From FAQ:

Is Datomic just for JVM languages? At the moment, yes. We have ideas for how to enable Datomic on non-JVM languages while preserving as much of the embedded power as possible.

Re: Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

#52

Post by alkby »

fogus wrote: post #18
nickik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe its so new and unique that its hard or impossible to explain it in a pragraph.

Datomic is a UFO filled with advanced alien technology that has landed right on the National Mall.

Any access to source? Looks nice but I have a bunch of questions about transactor.

Re: Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

#53

Post by locopati »

The idea seems very interesting, but the non-free aspect of this seems likely to limit its uptake. I cannot install a version of this for small-scale, personal, or not-for-profit needs other than using a non-durable VM that saves state only when suspended. Even if I buy into the Datomic pricing model and that pricing is not prohibitive, I am still bound to Amazon's pricing model (though hopefully that will expand over time to other cloud services to prevent vendor lock-in).

Re: Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

#54

Post by mark_l_watson »

Reading through the site reminds me of append-only CouchDB (or even better, BigCouch) both Datomic datoms and CouchDB documents have time stamps so the state of data is available for different times.

This looks new: local query peers that cache enough data to perform queries (I don't understand how that works, but it looks like indices might be local, with some data also cached locally).

Also interesting that it seems to use DynamoDB under the hood.

Re: Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

#56

Post by stevelosh »

lukev wrote: post #50
stevelosh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the FAQ: Thus, Datomic is well suited for applications that require write consistency and read scalability. Seems like they're not focusing on high-write situations.

Correct, it's not write-scalable in the same way it is read-scalable. The transactor is a bottleneck for writes. However, that doesn't mean it has slow writes - it should still do writes at least on a par with any traditional transactional database, and probably a good deal faster since it's append-only.

I'm more concerned with what happens when the transactor goes down, or gets silently partitioned from some of the clients. I assume reads will continue to work but all writes will break?

I'd also like to know more about how the app-side caching works. If I've got a terabyte of User records and want to query for all users of a certain type, does a terabyte of data get sent over the wire, cached, and queried locally? Only the fields I ask for? Something else?

Re: Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

#57

Post by drcode »

locopati wrote: post #53

The idea seems very interesting, but the non-free aspect of this seems likely to limit its uptake. I cannot install a version of this for small-scale, personal, or not-for-profit needs other than using a non-durable VM that saves state only when suspended. Even if I buy into the Datomic pricing model and that pricing is not prohibitive, I am still bound to Amazon's pricing model (though hopefully that will expand ove…

I think Rich & the gang need to focus on a niche market for now as this technology matures. I expect they will work with a handful of enterprise clients for now but roll out "convenience features" in the future (i.e. easy to use and inexpensive hosting for smaller customers.)

Re: Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

#59

Post by omaranto »

nickik wrote: post #44
fogus wrote: post #27

Stuart Halloway provides more information in his Datalog querying in Datomic screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=b...

This is really cool. Highly recommended. You see some querycode in clojure and in java.

I'd say all the query code is written in Clojure, but if you insist on using Java, you can put the queries inside Java strings.

Re: Rich Hickey's new project: datomic.com

#60

Post by swalsh »

nickik wrote: post #36
swalsh wrote: post #32

Clojure is an amazing language, so i'm willing to go the extra mile to attempt to understand this work. However there's one thing that I can't get over. From my understanding, the big idea is the query engine is brought local, and the storage would eventually come local too. It seems like for smallish db's this is fine. What happens though if you're working with a rather large database? Additionally, If local means t…

What does this have to do with clojure? This system could have been build in any language, clojure only uses some of the same ideas (working with values). I cant help you with your question, sorry.

From my understanding the same guy wrote both. My point was that I personally view Clojure as a bit of genius.
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