I think the neatest outcome it that this may encourage more people to play around with datalog. Coming from a SQL background, I used to say that I wanted first class functions in SQL. Who knew that this little restricted version of prolog would enjoy such a renaissance? See also cascalog . . .
Datomic Free Edition
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: Datomic Free Edition
#22I saw this page, and was not surprised that it doesn't say what Datomic is. A lot of people make that mistake. So, I clicked the link at the end of the page to go to your website. I followed some more links. I found three links that talked about feature, benefits, and the architecture, and clicked all three opening them in tabs. I read the first part of every page and then skimmed the rest. I have no damn clue what t…
Well, I got stopped as soon as I hit the Javascript-dependent template.
I realize I'm a bit on the fringe, here, and I've complained about it before. But I do not like "basic" web pages, e.g. this blog post, becoming dependent upon local execution of arbitrary code (in which camp I'm not including HTML and CSS).
For me, it's a matter of security. And I'll continue to whitelist, based upon established trust.
Re: Datomic Free Edition
#23My nutshell answer to "What is datomic?":
It is a database system for Java or Clojure where not all of the database code runs on the server. Instead, the server is fast and "dumb" and all the work for your queries runs on each client individually, which just cache chunks of data from the servers as needed. It turns out having your queries run on the clients has nice properties in terms of query language power and performance.
Additionally, it has an extremely powerful and elegant way of tracking historical information: No data is ever forgotten, so that if you want to say "run this query against the database as it was last Wednesday" you can do that. In a typical production application, much of the complexity in the database comes from having special auditing tables that keep track of historical info- In datomic you don't need to have such tables.
Finally, it can do all of these things while still being highly scalable (with a small caveat that it might not fully scale in the rare case where you have an app that is extremely write-heavy.)
Re: Datomic Free Edition
#24My nutshell answer to "What is datomic?": It is a database system for Java or Clojure where not all of the database code runs on the server. Instead, the server is fast and "dumb" and all the work for your queries runs on each client individually, which just cache chunks of data from the servers as needed. It turns out having your queries run on the clients has nice properties in terms of query language power and per…
Also in the revolutionary category, all data is treated as immutable, and what we traditionally consider an update to a piece of stored data (with the change being made in-place of the original datum) is treated as a new fact with just the time being different (a new record with the change in value is created along with the time of change). Since data is never changed, only added, there is no need for the traditional transaction locks, etc., thus providing a whole new way to manage and process your data and providing a perfect audit trail in the process.
Re: Datomic Free Edition
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly what happened to me. I wanted to know what it is, opened those pages in tabs, read half of first one and skipped to the second one. It was soooo long ( http://docs.datomic.com/tutorial.html ) I knew I couldn't finish reading it in less than 5 hours and came here to ask: What is this, and why/who would want to use it? It could be useful for a project I'm working on, but I just couldn't understand what…
Probably the best way to get your mind around Datomic conceptually would be to watch these introductory videos[1] Rich and Stu put together when first introducing Datomic. It's pretty revolutionary, IMO. Edit: In response to those too pressed for time to watch the videos, you can read the rationale[2] for Datomic. However, it is a bit long. Rich and Stu may want to summarize it for the really pressed for time. :) [1]…
I've seen a number of comments over the last few weeks to the effect of "if you don't understand this product, watch the intro video".
In my opinion, if a product can't be described in a couple of concise sentences, it's going to run into some major roadblocks in getting traction.
Watching a video incurs a number of costs - the time taken to watch the video, the effort of plugging in headphones, the pain of buffering content. All of these are minor obstacles, but you want to eliminate as many reasons to leave as possible when attracting a new customer.
Re: Datomic Free Edition
#26My nutshell answer to "What is datomic?": It is a database system for Java or Clojure where not all of the database code runs on the server. Instead, the server is fast and "dumb" and all the work for your queries runs on each client individually, which just cache chunks of data from the servers as needed. It turns out having your queries run on the clients has nice properties in terms of query language power and per…
Also in the revolutionary category, all data is treated as immutable, and what we traditionally consider an update to a piece of stored data (with the change being made in-place of the original datum) is treated as a new fact with just the time being different (a new record with the change in value is created along with the time of change). Since data is never changed, only added, there is no need for the traditional…
I did say "no data is ever forgotten" which is a way of explaining immutability to a layman :)
Re: Datomic Free Edition
#27My nutshell answer to "What is datomic?": It is a database system for Java or Clojure where not all of the database code runs on the server. Instead, the server is fast and "dumb" and all the work for your queries runs on each client individually, which just cache chunks of data from the servers as needed. It turns out having your queries run on the clients has nice properties in terms of query language power and per…
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Re: Datomic Free Edition
#28I saw this page, and was not surprised that it doesn't say what Datomic is. A lot of people make that mistake. So, I clicked the link at the end of the page to go to your website. I followed some more links. I found three links that talked about feature, benefits, and the architecture, and clicked all three opening them in tabs. I read the first part of every page and then skimmed the rest. I have no damn clue what t…
It's a project that allows the Clojure guys to monetize their work.
Go ahead HN Lisp lovers, kill my karma!
Re: Datomic Free Edition
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also in the revolutionary category, all data is treated as immutable, and what we traditionally consider an update to a piece of stored data (with the change being made in-place of the original datum) is treated as a new fact with just the time being different (a new record with the change in value is created along with the time of change). Since data is never changed, only added, there is no need for the traditional…
I did say "no data is ever forgotten" which is a way of explaining immutability to a layman :)
Yes you did. As well as the automatic audit trail. I just wanted to emphasize the implications this has for the design of the Datomic engine. :)
Re: Datomic Free Edition
#30I have to say that the introduction of a turn of the century enterprise software pricing model is not a welcome thing. I think the subscription model is a much better approach in todays market. In particular since I think Datomic's early adopters are going to be mainly startups and not larger enterprise customers. Their initial hosted transactor model was a good idea as well. The problem I think was that it was hard…
Maybe I'm just lazy, but the biggest impediment to using Datomic right now is that I don't want to deal with the hosting and configuration that's required.
If I could just go to datomic.com, log in and click "create new database" and call it "my_new_app_database" and then immediately use that database from my app that would be fantastic.
(In short, I wish there was a heroku for datomic... admittedly, paying customers probably aren't impeded by such newb issues.)