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Datomic: Look at all the things I'm not doing

augustl.com

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Re: Datomic: Look at all the things I'm not doing

#6

Post by paulgb »

DonbunEf7 wrote: post #3

Nice. Too bad it's not Free Software.

I think this is an important point, and I know it often derided as people asking a company to give something away for free, so I want to defend it.

I admire Cognitect's ambition in going up against big database vendors as a small team, and creating something very unique. That said, as a user, it's frustrating that when I get an error I can't just pop open the source and see what's going on. It's frustrating that the console could use a few usability improvements that an interested OSS developer could add, but that don't happen. It's frustrating that the Client wire protocol hasn't been released yet, so support for non-JVM languages (which are provided by the community and do not have official Cognitect support) are stuck using the deprecated and unsupported REST interface.

I am not ideologically against proprietary software, I just think Datomic would be orders of magnitude more useful with an active OSS ecosystem around it.

Re: Datomic: Look at all the things I'm not doing

#7

Post by augustl »

BenoitP wrote: post #4

This will be a tongue in cheek comment, but there's another thing Datomic isn't making you do either: GDPR compliance

OP here :)

True, in that there's no solution out of the box. I kind of want to make a "look at all the things I have to do", and GDPR compliance is one of those things where there are probably many ways to do it wrong with Datomic, and a few ways of doing it right.

One thing you can do, is to have a separate database for each person/user. It is trivial to join across multiple databases in Datomic, and you can even do crazy things like joining between a database and an excel spreadsheet. And deleting an entire database is easy. So there's that.

There's also excision, but that's a super expensive operation that you shouldn't be doing as part of your day to day routines, according to the Datomic team. I'd like to know more here. For example, is it OK to excise data once a week? Maybe it's GDPR compliant if deletion requests are batched like that.

There's also crypto shredding (encrypt values with separate key for each user, throw away the key on deletion request), but I'm not sure how GDPR compliant that is, since it leaves a lot of metadata behind. And you obviously can't encrypt values that you want to query on with the query engine.

Re: Datomic: Look at all the things I'm not doing

#8

Post by augustl »

paulgb wrote: post #6
DonbunEf7 wrote: post #3

Nice. Too bad it's not Free Software.

I think this is an important point, and I know it often derided as people asking a company to give something away for free, so I want to defend it. I admire Cognitect's ambition in going up against big database vendors as a small team, and creating something very unique. That said, as a user, it's frustrating that when I get an error I can't just pop open the source and see what's going on. It's frustrating that the…

I am regularly alarmed by the fact that nobody has tried to make an open source clone yet..

Re: Datomic: Look at all the things I'm not doing

#10

Post by agumonkey »

paulgb wrote: post #6
DonbunEf7 wrote: post #3

Nice. Too bad it's not Free Software.

I think this is an important point, and I know it often derided as people asking a company to give something away for free, so I want to defend it. I admire Cognitect's ambition in going up against big database vendors as a small team, and creating something very unique. That said, as a user, it's frustrating that when I get an error I can't just pop open the source and see what's going on. It's frustrating that the…

Do they respond to users comments too ?
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