Datomic time queries

Datomic Applications
1

Hi guys,

Imagine having the following Datomic schema:

    [{:db/ident       :group/name
      :db/valueType   :db.type/string
      :db/cardinality :db.cardinality/one
      :db/unique      :db.unique/value
      :db/doc         "group name"}
     {:db/ident       :group/items
      :db/valueType   :db.type/ref
      :db/cardinality :db.cardinality/many
      :db/isComponent true
      :db/doc         "group items"}
     {:db/ident       :item/t
      :db/valueType   :db.type/instant
      :db/cardinality :db.cardinality/one
      :db/doc         "item t"}
     {:db/ident       :item/content
      :db/valueType   :db.type/bytes
      :db/cardinality :db.cardinality/one
      :db/doc         "item content"}]

And also imagine that a certain group has millions of items.

Is there any efficient way to make queries such as:

  • last item before or at ‘some-t’
  • next item after ‘some-t’

Datomic has worked out so incredibly well for everything, I would hate this one small bit to make me move to another database.

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Regards,
Mykola

2

If time is your most selective attribute, you should use the Log API.

There are some minor differences in the API between Datomic Cloud and Datomic On-Prem:

Datomic Cloud: https://docs.datomic.com/cloud/time/log.html
https://github.com/cognitect-labs/day-of-datomic-cloud/blob/master/tutorial/log.clj

Datomic On-Prem: https://docs.datomic.com/on-prem/log.html
https://github.com/Datomic/day-of-datomic/blob/master/tutorial/log.clj and https://github.com/Datomic/day-of-datomic/blob/master/tutorial/time-rules.clj

3

thank you marshall,

I have played with the APIs, and a few different indexing options, it looks like handling millions of records in the same series isn’t something Datomic is optimised for. I might need some TSDB for this.
Anyway, Datomic is fantastic for pretty much everything else in the world :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Mykola