Rich Hickey: Deconstructing the Database
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points people to it as the clearest account of why Datomic is designed the way it is and of the problems with conventional database architecture.
What it is
Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and designer of Datomic, gives a JaxConf 2012 talk that takes apart traditional database architecture. He presents a different way to think about databases and explains the reasoning behind Datomic's fact-based design.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2012 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec slowmovintarget · 2020-04 · on “The Impedance Mismatch Is Our Fault (2012)”
Rich Hickey's talk on the design of Datomic is also something every programmer should see at least once: [this video]
Recommends MoosePlissken · 2012-10 · on “Rethinking caching in web apps”
We recently started using Solr in a similar manner where I work. We don't go as far as to pack an index in with our code, but each page serving instance has an embedded Solr server that it uses to pull a lot of fairly static data. Those indexes are updated nightly from a master Solr server which imports its data from a normal relational database. So far it has worked really well, but I don't think it really offers many advantages scalability wise over other NoSQL solutions. Like most other solutions it trades fast writes/consistent reads for fast reads, which is fine in many cases. Around the time we were adding Solr though, I heard about Datomic ( [LINK] ). I haven't had time to really inve
Recommends shotgun · 2015-09 · on “Ask HN: CTM gave CS the “kernel language”. Is there a “kernel database”?”
Although tangential to your question, I feel you might enjoy presentations by Rich Hickey wherein he describes traditional database architectures and presents the whys and wherefores behind Datomic. For example: [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]
Recommends pgt · 2018-08 · on “Idempotence: What is it and why should I care?”
You will enjoy the fact-based database Datomic, which is the reason Rich Hickey made Clojure: [this video] Datalog is a much, much, much query language better than SQL: [LINK]