On: It's about time – Approaching bitemporality

[raydiatian]

It looks like I might get flagged for this, please show me some love Dang, I’m only trying to be helpful to the author.

> What is bitemporality?

You have this as a header but I’m really bummed out that the article doesn’t have a sentence that begins with “bitemporality is..” I think some illustrations to accompany your ideas might go a long way as well, as I still have no idea what bitemporality is in this scenario, although it sounds cool.

> The “bi” in bitemporal database hints at the fact, that for the use case described above we have two different times we’d like to track: On one axis we have the validity of the data.

I genuinely don’t mean to be rude, only to provide constructive feedback. This section kind of broke my flow, because you’re implying that validity is a form of time: “ two different times we’d like to track: On one axis we have the validity.” Is that intended?

[refset → raydiatian]

> I think some illustrations to accompany your ideas might go a long way as well

I'm not the OP, but I built this visual tool recently which might be of interest https://bitemporal-visualizer.github.io/

[raydiatian → refset]

A picture really is worth a thousand words. I totally get what bitemporality means now.

[javahippie → raydiatian]

Author here. Thanks for pointing this out, I obviously did not manage to provide a good definition of the term and will update the section accordingly

[alexvoda → javahippie]

A calendar app is a database that tracks app time.

Git is a database that tracks system time.

A calendar on git is bitemporal.

[lichtenberger → raydiatian]

There's the valid time on the one hand when something is valid in the real world and the transaction time, the time at which it's known to the database system, when it's recorded/committed.