Time and histories in Analytics

Datomic Cloud
1

In analytics, we often need to ask questions regarding an entity’s time, for example:

  • when is the entity first seen in the system?
  • when is the entity last touched?

In old-school sql, we might setup columns such as created_at or updated_at with trigger to ensure the values are accurate or an ORM might manage that for us. However, Datomic has a native history API that can help us answer the questions.

(defn created-at [db eid]
  (let [hist (d/history db)]
    (ffirst (d/q {:query '[:find (min ?inst)
                           :in $ ?e
                           :where [?e _ _ ?tx true]
                                  [?tx :db/txInstant ?inst]]
                  :args [hist eid]}))))

(defn updated-at [db eid]
  (ffirst (d/q {:query '[:find (max ?inst)
                         :in $ ?e
                         :where [?e _ _ ?tx]
                                [?tx :db/txInstant ?inst]]
                :args [db eid]})))))

Is there anyway I can expose them as a column in Analytics?

1 Like
2

@hden We do not currently expose t to analytics. So you cannot expose these as columns for SQL queries. However, it is a feature we are looking at and was previously discussed on this forum post here: How to limit the size of the result for analytics query

2 Likes
3

@hden were you able to find a solution to this?

4

Nope :frowning: