A database that doesn't "change"? Go behind the scenes of Datomic, the immutable database!

closure [Music] is collaborations foreign hi I'm Joe uh Jolene my name is Joel my name is my name is Jared Benford my name is how long have you been 30 months but since I started I had some contact to say something so that's about three years I've been using closure since 2016 2017 I think I have been working with datomic adjacently for four years I have been on the closure and atomic team since 2016. I started using closure in 2010. what are the biggest challenges in developing a maintaining a database management solution satisfying users data access needs in a performant way I would say helping our customers understand how to use the software in an effective way biggest thing about databases is they have single scalability all the time and there's one of the key concepts of the atomic is that we accumulate data over time once we don't delete data which is signaled facts about changing data I think that one of the biggest challenges to working on Atomic is that we are at the bottom level of a lot of people's uh application and making a change at that level it you want to be careful about breaking someone else that's always a concern for our team what do you think that are the main points that distinguish closure from other programming languages I think that there's this pervasive the pervasive use of a consistent abstraction so the sequence abstraction right I only have like four data types it's it's so easy I don't have to make a class I don't have to make Factory I don't need none of that when they're trying to solve a problem uh you don't want to be dealing with type Theory or you you want to really stay connected to your problem and closure helps you do that through like Relentless focus on on data processing it's understand the problems that you're trying to solve before you go into building identify what the problem is take a problem oriented approach in 10 15 years as we improve features there will be more excitement more success stories and people here other companies like new bank over time exponential growth the cool things like work very obviously just getting started right like so the data right it's organized in a way on disk such that we could project that data into any which way we want right like there's so many things that you can do now that you like once you have the data well-known structure enable you to solve business cases that you didn't know you had stomach is fairly new I have a pretty good path uh to the future we can definitely extend the Tesla's time I think I think the future is bright I I'm very excited about the things that we're working on right now our team growing in size having more people is going to mean that hopefully we can do more in 15 years I hope that Atomic is a database that changes the way people think about how to make applications how to store data how to and I hope in 15 years I see more databases that are using data log for instance I also hope that there's more people using the tonic-like things probably having female recommendation and even more like best practices uh share with our with our customers ensure that they they can get even more context about what the atomic is doing relying on users to maintain their databases as stable and scalable as possible having this enclosure in 15 years from now closure is going to maintain uh you know its stability continue to work as is and boring and consistent and you know things will just keep working I think it's going to be incredibly uh successful I hope to see more systems uh built-in closure and I'm bringing all the good stuff to different domain areas I think that'll be that'll be a huge success awesome that's it thank you because foreign

Fourth and final episode of our special webseries celebrating Clojure's 15th anniversary. Meet the team behind the creation and maintenance of Datomic, the immutable database, and also the relationship with Clojure!