
Rich Hickey on Datomic Ions [video] - alpeware
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thpzXjmYyGk&feature=youtu.be
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lbj
In our experience Datomic has been quite the disappointment. Datalog is great,
the rest is less so. Off the charts and unpredictable memory consumption, slow
queries with no hope of optimization (we're talking 2.3seconds/100k rows)
unexplainable dataloss. So many great ideas, sketchy implementation. Cant say
if the Cloud version is better, we never tried.

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gargamel9
Oooops, you forgot the first rule of Datomic license: Thou shall not talk
about the Datomic (un)performance!

~~~
stingraycharles
Yep, for how much they are involved in the open source community, it's fairly
disappointing this is not allowed:

[https://www.datomic.com/on-prem-eula.html](https://www.datomic.com/on-prem-
eula.html)

"[The licensee will not] (j) publicly display or communicate the results of
internal performance testing or other benchmarking or performance evaluation
of the Software; "

I wish they wouldn't do this, it seems that they simply do not want to talk
about this topic, even though the reason people usually choose Datomic is not
performance but rather its abstractions -- so why the hostile attitude?

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RaleyField
> simply do not want to talk about this topic

I wonder if there are many respectable companies that don't allow you to post
benchmarks. It's almost as if they don't have any confidence in their product
that they have to resort to such extraordinary measures.

~~~
striking
Oracle, Microsoft. They're called "DeWitt clauses", after the researcher who
first invoked Oracle's wrath after publishing benchmarks and finding them to
be the slowest. Read on:

* more about DeWitt: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#The_%22DeWitt_Cla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#The_%22DeWitt_Clause%22)

* an overview of database licenses with such a clause today: [https://stackoverflow.com/a/12116865/1376005](https://stackoverflow.com/a/12116865/1376005)

* an essay discussing the legality of such clauses, with links to further material on/about them: [https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html](https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html)

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icey
This is about a feature of the Datomic database called Ions, which appear to
be analogous to stored procedures (e.g. running Clojure functions in the db).
From reading
[https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/ions/ions.html](https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/ions/ions.html),
that's an oversimplification, but I didn't know what it was so figured I'd
save someone a search.

~~~
gw
Transaction functions were always part of datomic, even when running it
outside of AWS. I think of Ion as a tool that wraps all the complex insanity
of AWS so you can write an app as closely as possible to how you'd write a
traditional Clojure app meant to run on a single server. In that sense it's
not even specifically about datomic... You can even choose not to use it as
your database, but of course then you'll be on your own as far as scaling your
db.

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Scarbutt
These is really nice for some, but on the other side, I'm worried the peer is
going to be considered legacy.

