Comment by adsharma
8 hours ago
Why do you need another database and another query language for this?
Existing cypher based databases which support typed properties (including timestamps) on relationship tables can handle this use case just fine.
8 hours ago
Why do you need another database and another query language for this?
Existing cypher based databases which support typed properties (including timestamps) on relationship tables can handle this use case just fine.
bitemporal does not mean 'including timestamps' and out of existing RDBMSes only the truly most expensive ones support some kind of temporal queries; I've checked out for a bit, but if there's any with native bitemporal support that'd be quite the news
Bi-temporal means the DB keeps track of transaction time and valid/effective time separately.
Most databases have a notion of logical clock to implement MVCC/transactions. So this is just a mapping. Some in the spanner family actually use a drift limited physical clock.
The second part is using an index to answer queries about facts in the past. Like what was the capital of India in 1800?
There are existing embedded graph databases which do this.
Disclosure: I maintain one.
Is bitemporal more than being able to time travel by transaction and having some sort of time lookup for next transaction? It's a new term to me.
This is old but not much has changed really: https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/~rts/tdbbook.pdf
https://adityamukho.com/exploring-temporality-in-databases
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Most graph databases I'm aware of require a server and aren't embedded into applications. Using datalog and applying it to graphs also more general and thus preferable than cypher which is still a niche specifically for graph databases.
Also "because they can" seems obligatory.
I feel you, I am completely lost with all new ''graph flavoured DB". I keep challenging those (with the help of Opus model ) and the answer is always the same "use progresql".
Have to watch out that Claude hasn’t just figured out that you like being told to use Postgres lol
Nope. Memory and data sharing for training are turned off. (I put 'turned off' in quotes because I don't know if Anthropic really keeps its promise. Often, it is cheaper for companies to break the law and just pay the fine.) I also use adversarial review and the '10th man' rule a lot. In fact, I spend more time planning than executing. I explicitly told Claude never to make a choice without proving it with numbers. By numbers, I mean benchmark results and score-based decisions (for example: 0.5 points for speed, 1 point for libraries, 2 points for documentation). The only thing I doubt are benchmark numbers, because they change depending on the hardware and what you test. Anyway, we always end up choosing PostgreSQL for large projects or SQLite for light ones (which makes sense).
Opus recommending a database server to swap in for an embedded file based database is either an outcome of the overwhelming volume of cloud based web dev + API glue code chat it was trained on or it's being obsequious but wrong.