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Datomic is Free

blog.datomic.com

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Re: Datomic is Free

#91

Post by mcbits »

evantbyrne wrote: post #68
roguas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to add a lot of scaffolding to postgres to make it semi-immutable. datomic just is, wanna know previous user email, just go back and see. Out of the box, without thinking about it.

Immutability is certainly tempting for certain kinds of data. Does it handle use-cases where data needs to be deleted though? i.e., privacy compliance.

It looks like they call that excision, which leaves behind a breadcrumb saying something was deleted and which can't itself be deleted.

Re: Datomic is Free

#92

Post by alecco »

mbesto wrote: post #54
adamfeldman wrote: post #3

What is Datomic, you ask? It's a database written in Clojure. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=datomic Datomic is an operational database management system - designed for transactional, domain-specific data. It is not designed to be a data warehouse, nor a high-churn high-throughput system (such as a time-series database or log store). It is a good fit for systems that store valuable information of record, require developer…

For 90% of the web devs that just spin up Postgres/MySQL, why would you use Datomic over that?

Just the temporal properties alone make it very useful for anything where it matters like billing, finance, inventory. Else you are in views/schema/indexing hell to do it on top of SQL.

There is some SQL temporal support but it's not great and varies a lot. Also since it's not native to the storage it has a lot of complexity issues under the rug making it not great.

Many financial systems use Event Sourcing (OOP + ORM). I had to suffer this at a previous employer.

See https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/2018-11-12-datomic-even...

Re: Datomic is Free

#93

Post by xpe »

spapas82 wrote: post #32

It seems that they give the binaries for free but they won't release the source code. Can somebody explain to me what's the point of keeping the source closed in this case? I really can't think of any reason

> I really can't think of any reason

What have you thought about or read so far?

Re: Datomic is Free

#94

Post by [deleted] »

evantbyrne wrote: post #68
roguas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to add a lot of scaffolding to postgres to make it semi-immutable. datomic just is, wanna know previous user email, just go back and see. Out of the box, without thinking about it.

Immutability is certainly tempting for certain kinds of data. Does it handle use-cases where data needs to be deleted though? i.e., privacy compliance.

[deleted]

Re: Datomic is Free

#95

Post by amluto »

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?

Never. On the other hand, I have considerable confidence that I could do so, and that if something goes wrong with upstream development, someone is likely to do so.

If I use a free-binary-but-no-source product, I’m much more likely to get stuck.

(Of course, as a regretful MySQL user, I am pretty stuck, but largely because MySQL is, in many respects, a terrible product. It does, quite reliably, get security updates at the kind of general maintenance that keeps it working no worse than it ever did.)

Re: Datomic is Free

#96

Post by JoshTriplett »

MrGilbert wrote: post #82
jchw wrote: post #30

Not complaining about the actual announcement itself here: seems pretty sweet all things considered, But: the "Is it Open Source?" section should lead with "No." It's not a complicated question, and it's not a complicated answer. I think it's weird to talk about having "all the same rights" without explaining why that matters particularly (it does matter, it's just not explained much!) but it is somewhat tangential t…

I'm not sure, but I think from a marketing perspective, you do not want to write "No" anywhere. I might be wrong, and I'd love if someone with knowledge in this area could answer. It's something I recall from the back of my mind...

Dishonesty and subterfuge are bad marketing tactics.

Re: Datomic is Free

#97

Post by xmlblog »

a2800276 wrote: post #77
lolinder wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, with your hypotheticals—when was the last time you needed to do any of that with Postgres or another FOSS DBMS? For the vast majority of use cases, a FOSS DBMS and a free-as-in-beer DBMS are indistinguishable. If you're in a category where they're not, then don't use Datomic, but this is still far more than a publicity stunt.

We must be working in a different world. In all my career I've not once worked with a serious business that did not have a support contract for their database system open source or not. Most of those had escrow agreements for central closed source components with vendors in case the vendor went out of business. (obviously only for things perceived as critical and from companies with some perceived risk of failure). A…

Free beer binaries are not mutually exclusive of Enterprise support agreements featuring all those things you mentioned above _for people that need that_.

Re: Datomic is Free

#98

Post by dagw »

adamfeldman wrote: post #8
endisneigh wrote: post #4

The price is certainly right, but has anyone used this in production? What was your experience like?

One example: https://www.datomic.com/nubanks-story.html

Worth keeping in mind that Nubank owns the company that makes Datomic, so that might colour their opinion. On the flip side they probably wouldn't have bought the company if they thought their product was crap.

Re: Datomic is Free

#99

Post by stonemetal12 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #14

Aside, I remember HN in 2009 or so where Clojure was a daily homepage staple and Rich Hickey was putting out his talks about Clojure and code design. I watched a lot of that and used Clojure fulltime for five years. Wonder what he's up to these days.

>used Clojure fulltime for five years.

How did that work out for you? Usually following a hype cycle, there is a negative hype cycle i.e. Mongo is webscale, then Mongo is a buggy mess.

Clojure seemed to just fade away. Did it turn out well or are there interesting pitfalls that make it not as great as advertised?

Re: Datomic is Free

#100

Post by moomin »

frou_dh wrote: post #39
lib-dev wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those talks inspired far more than Clojure itself. It sort of started this movement toward simplicity as a value.

If that's the case then all the people running around praising the ""simplicity"" of golang got the wrong end of the stick completely from Rich's classic presentations.

The thing is, Hickey was entirely right to reject this idea of “Simplicity” being the same thing as “Easy”. But he then decided to conflate in “comprehensible” which it turns out is very much a matter of aesthetics.

Turns out if you really focus on composability above other concerns you get Haskell.

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