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Datomic is Free

blog.datomic.com

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Re: Datomic is Free

#201

Post by kamma4434 »

brundolf wrote: post #177
augustl wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datomic already sort of does this :) You configure a storage backend (Datomic does not write to disk directly) which can be dynamodb, riak, or any JDBC database including postgres. You won't get readable data in PG though, as Datomic stores opaque compressed chunks in a key/value structure. The chunks are adressable via the small handful of built-in indexes that Datomic provides for querying, and the indexes are cove…

Interesting! I assumed Datomic was entirely custom Now I'm even more curious if you could skip Datomic and just do something like this directly with a relational DB in production

Yes, but you end up rewriting Datomic!

Re: Datomic is Free

#202

Post by bavell »

gleenn wrote: post #193
PreachSoup wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: What's the difference between nested oop objects (composition over inheiritance) vs maps of nested structures?

Rich Hickey has a great talk about how Objects are data structures with unique interfaces that are unnecessary complexity. He showed and example of a web server with a web request object with request headers etc etc. Doing simple things like collecting information out of that nested object structure is bespoke and harder than it should be for no real gain. If everything is a map or list or set, it becomes completely…

> Unfortunately I can't remember exactly where the part of this talk is.

If you or anyone else remembers, I'd love to watch

Re: Datomic is Free

#203

Post by [deleted] »

bavell wrote: post #202
gleenn wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich Hickey has a great talk about how Objects are data structures with unique interfaces that are unnecessary complexity. He showed and example of a web server with a web request object with request headers etc etc. Doing simple things like collecting information out of that nested object structure is bespoke and harder than it should be for no real gain. If everything is a map or list or set, it becomes completely…

> Unfortunately I can't remember exactly where the part of this talk is. If you or anyone else remembers, I'd love to watch

[deleted]

Re: Datomic is Free

#204

Post by squeaky-clean »

remram wrote: post #152
nerdponx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize it was possible to release binaries under a different license from the source code that generated them. In this case, is the "source code" just the physical machine code or bytecode in the binary?

You can attach any license text to anything, but most open-source license make little sense when applied to binaries. Like in this case, the Apache 2 license doesn't make distinction between the source and binary, referring to both as "the Work": > You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that (…

I suppose you could modify the binaries directly and redistribute and it would be legally allowed? Not like anyone is going to do that though.

Re: Datomic is Free

#205

Post by spariev »

augustl wrote: post #11

Datomic's is perfect for probably 90% of small-ish backoffice systems that never has to be web scale (i.e. most of what I do at work). Writing in a single thread removes a whole host of problems in understanding (and implementing) how data changes over time. (And a busy MVCC sql db spends 75% of its time doing coordination, not actual writes, so a single thread applying a queue of transactions in sequence can be fast…

One thing which is quite hard to do in Datomic is simple pagination on a large sorted dataset, as one can easily do with LIMIT/OFFSET in MySQL for example. There are solutions for some of the cases, but general case is not solved, as far as I remember (it’s been a while I used it extensively)

Re: Datomic is Free

#206

Post by tyre »

gleenn wrote: post #193
PreachSoup wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: What's the difference between nested oop objects (composition over inheiritance) vs maps of nested structures?

Rich Hickey has a great talk about how Objects are data structures with unique interfaces that are unnecessary complexity. He showed and example of a web server with a web request object with request headers etc etc. Doing simple things like collecting information out of that nested object structure is bespoke and harder than it should be for no real gain. If everything is a map or list or set, it becomes completely…

“No real gain”

I don’t agree with this. iirc Rack ultimately uses and array to represent HTTP responses. It has three members: the status code, the headers, and the response body.

If you’re shipping a new change, is it easier to mistake response[0] or response.headers?

This is a trivial example, but the general class (ha) of trade-off is amplified with more complex objects.

I love clojure and lisp but the blindness behind a statement like “no real gain” has always kneecapped adoption.

Re: Datomic is Free

#207

Post by sharms »

bavell wrote: post #202
gleenn wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich Hickey has a great talk about how Objects are data structures with unique interfaces that are unnecessary complexity. He showed and example of a web server with a web request object with request headers etc etc. Doing simple things like collecting information out of that nested object structure is bespoke and harder than it should be for no real gain. If everything is a map or list or set, it becomes completely…

> Unfortunately I can't remember exactly where the part of this talk is. If you or anyone else remembers, I'd love to watch

Here is this specific part cut out from the larger talk "Clojure made simple": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSEQfqNYNAc

Re: Datomic is Free

#208

Post by tyre »

dimitar wrote: post #115
electroly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone needs to have the working set of your database in memory, why shouldn't it be your app server and business logic? This one confused me. The obvious reason why you don't want the whole working set of your database in the app server's memory is because you have lots of app servers, whereas you only have one database[1]. This suggests that you put the working set of the database in the database , so that you s…

Consider this use case - in addition to your web app, you have a reporting service that makes heavy duty reports; if you run one at a bad time, bad things might happen like users not being able to log in or do any other important work, because the database is busy with the reports. So in a traditional DB you might have a DBA set up a reporting database so the operational one is not affected. Using Datomic the reporti…

With AWS you can create a replica with a few clicks. Latency is measured in milliseconds for the three-nines observed usage.

I don’t think this is a huge challenge (anymore) for Postgres or whatever traditional database.

Re: Datomic is Free

#209

Post by moorg »

For those who haven't followed the story:

2007 - the Clojure programming language is announced by Rich Hickey and gains quite a bit of traction over the next 5 or 6 years. It never becomes a "top 5" language, but it could still today be arguably considered a mainstream language. It's been endorsed as "the best general purpose programming language out there" by "Uncle" Bob Martin[1] (author of Clean Code) and Gene Kim[2] (auther of The Phoenix Project, the seminal DevOps book). The fact that Rich spent two years working on it without pay and without the commercial backing many other languages enjoy is a real testament to his commitment and his vision. A Clojure-related emacs package[3] quotes Rich when it starts a REPL: "Design is about pulling things apart."

2012 - the Datomic database is announced by Rich Hickey's company. The database is praised for its ingenuity and its "time travel" features. It was designed to be deployed anywhere in the beginning, but, over time, it became difficult to deploy outside of AWS environments and even the AWS deployment path was quite cumbersome--the Datomic marketing page used to feature a maze-like diagram of all the AWS-specific features needed to make the thing work (it would be nice to find a link to that picture); I'd think most companies would have trouble digesting that and integrating it into their technology "stack".

2020 - Nubank (a Brazilian fintech backed by at least one US venture firm and a large production user of Datomic) acquires Rich Hickey's company. It appears Datamic never gained much use outside of a handful of companies. Making it free of charge (2023) may be the cost-effective thing to do in such a situation if it costs more to handle billing and payments than are brought in. The reason they're not releasing the source code could be legal one or simply the fact that open sourcing a large piece of software takes a lot of effort--something a for-profit financial services company like Nubank doesn't prioritize (rightly so).

1: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2019/08/22/WhyClojure.... 2: https://itrevolution.com/articles/love-letter-to-clojure-par... 3: https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/blob/master/cider-uti...

Re: Datomic is Free

#210

Post by ingenieroariel »

lolinder wrote: post #42
a2800276 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They licensed the binary under Apache. It's a publicity stunt.

Making your product available for free isn't a publicity stunt, it's a huge step for a business. And, in practice, it's not that much different for the average user if only the binaries are Apache licensed. When was the last time you needed to open up the Postgres source code and modify something?

Today I looked up pgvector's NixOS availability. For the past 15 years I have relied on postgis source being available and improved by the community for my day to day business.

My point is that the option to modify the source results in software bein available and community maintained in a way that binary only isn't. Even if I change the source myself just twice a decade.

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