Jepsen: Datomic Pro 1.0.7075
Datomic is a general-purpose database intended for systems of record. In many ways, Datomic is unusual. At any instant in time, the state of the database is represented by a set of [entity, attribute, value] (EAV) triples, known as datoms. Each datom declares that some entity (like a person) has a particular attribute (like a name) with a specific value (like “Vidrun”). The types and cardinality of attributes are controlled by a schema.
Datomic is also a temporal database: it models time explicitly. Every transaction is identified by a strictly monotonic logical timestamp t, as well as a wall-clock time txInstant. Transactions can assert a datom, adding it to the database, or they can retract a datom, removing it from the database. Every datom also retains a reference to the transaction that asserted or retracted it. A full datom is therefore a five-tuple of [entity, attribute, value, transaction, asserted-or-retracted?]. The database is an ever-growing set of these tuples.1
Users can request a snapshot state of the database at any logical or wall-clock time—right now or years in the past. They can also obtain a full view of the database’s history, allowing users to ask questions like “was there ever a time when Janelle Monáe and Cindi Mayweather were recorded in the same room together?”
