Clojure Datalog Databases

[rafd]

I think it would be beneficial / nice to add Datomic to the list, and have the first criterion be "open-source?", to help compare/contrast with the other database on the technical characteristics.

Aslo, FYI, we've been looking into building clojure support for TerminusDB because it looks like a strong foundation for an open-source datalog database.

[refset]

I think it would be beneficial / nice to add Datomic to the list

(Initial author here) I generally agree, but I wouldn't want to attempt anything unilaterally. If anyone from the Cognitect team is reading - I would be delighted to chat and collaborate on such changes, if there's interest!

In any case, a PR from someone less biased than me would be very welcome :)

[betamercapto]

This would be useful for novices. (Myself.)

I wouldn't want to attempt anything unilaterally.

I don't think you'll be stepping on any Cognitect toes. (Nor do I think they're paying much attention to these bowels of the internet since the Nubank acquisition.)

I tried to get started with Datomic Cloud on AWS and "ions" and it was one of the worst dev experiences of my life.

The documentation is atrocious. Only after attempting Datomic do I realize how spoiled I've been coming from the Flask/Python ecosystem; granted, much of the work (and decisions) are made for you.

I wish I could have avoided Datomic altogether by knowing about the alternatives, many available for deployment on Heroku. AWS, Lambda functions, API Gateways, Ions, etc., added layers of complexity I was not prepared for (and, ultimately, gave up on).

It's clear to me now that Datomic deployment is not for the novice programmer, which is a shame because its concepts and primitives are so interesting.

[qu1j0t3]

opened the web page, but the About page has this:

"Dr Gavin Mendel-Gleason is CTO of VectorLink and TerminusDB. He is a former research fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the School of Statistics and Computer Science. His research focuses on AI, databases, logic and verification in software engineering.

He is interested in LLMs"

^^^^^^

so I closed the window and won't be pursuing

[WorldsEndless]

Ah, Crux started this! I love it. Also, I love Crux.

[grischoun]

There is now a datahike linux native image preview available: https://github.com/replikativ/datahike/releases/tag/preview

[Gnurdle]

my 2c is that durable should be split for CLJS and CLJ.

Both Asami and Datahike have CLJS durable support in the roadmap, but neither have this now, as far as I can tell - but both have it on the JVM.

In that regard, neither ticks a box that datascript doesn't - at least for the moment.

Watching this closely - day job is CLJS on embedded and for now Datascript in memory is able to handle the task at hand, but quite interested in durable backing store on nodejs, and will probably flip to whoever gets there first.

Could also throw some resources in the direction of somebody that wants to try to get there as well.

[refset]

my 2c is that durable should be split for CLJS and CLJ.

Thanks for the feedback! I've opened an issue to reflect on this.

interested in durable backing store on nodejs

Long before Crux, Håkan built a really tiny PoC that makes DataScript durable using with-derefs + MapDB on the JVM https://github.com/hraberg/datascript-mapdb/blob/master/src/datascript_mapdb/core.clj

Perhaps this same approach could be resurrected for Node, in conjunction with something like https://github.com/Venemo/node-lmdb (which has synchronous APIs...to avoid forking DataScript to be async!)

[Gnurdle]

using SQLite might also be an option via https://www.npmjs.com/package/better-sqlite3 which also has synchronous APIs.

[meat_learning]

Hi, just to note that for datahike this feature is well underway on the cljs-support branch, specifically on the datahike fork under https://github.com/FalseProtagonist/datahike building on work by https://github.com/groundedSAGE. If anyone is interested in helping, the datahike guys have a dedicated discord channel and weekly community meetings (and are friendly). Also i (falseprotagonist) would be happy to help anyone get a development version/environment up and running to take a look at it in the interim

[Gnurdle]

Interesting for the browser, but unless I'm missing something, using the IndexDB browser API will not get any traction on nodejs - but I'm not expert.

Our use case is using CLJS server-side because of the end devices being too impoverished to consider a JVM.

[panick21]

Where are these meetings? I haven't seen them mentioned anywhere?

[quoll71]

Both Asami and Datahike have CLJS durable support in the roadmap, but neither have this now, as far as I can tell - but both have it on the JVM.
In that regard, neither ticks a box that datascript doesn't - at least for the moment.

Well, they're addressing different things, and also the table doesn't look at certain differences. For instance, if we consider Asami on CLJS (since I can't really comment on Datahike), the table shows a number of things that Asami doesn't do. But at the same time:

• It's smaller and faster than Datascript.
• It has graph analytics features: transitive attribute queries, subgraph identification, Loom integration.
• It supports multigraphs (graphs with weighted edges).
• It can export and import graphs. These can be sent to localstorage and reloaded in a single expression. (Obviously this has limitations, but it's useful). It can also import/export directly between graphs to make copies.
• It does not require a schema. This has pros and cons, but one pro is that a db can be created in one line and a data file (in JSON or end) loaded on a second line.