Richard Searle

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Query datoms via transaction id fails due to full scan error

06 Oct 2013

The recent versions of datomic provide a  log interface that provides access to the transactions that have been processed. That interface is unfortunately not implemented for memory databases, which complicates testing. The datoms stored by Datomic are quads, which include the identity of the transaction. It is thus possible to locate datoms asserted by a specific transaction
[:find ?e ?name  :in $ ?t  :where [ ?e :person/name ?name ?t]]
will locate all datoms that asserted a person's name for a transaction id:t One might then expect this would retrieve all the datoms asserted for a transaction
[:find ?e ?a ?v  :in $ ?t  :where [ ?e ?a ?v ?t]]
That query fails with "Insufficient binding of db clause: [?e ?a ?v ?t] would cause full scan". Which would make sense if datomic does not provide an index over transaction id. However, it is not clear how the log interface can provide reasonable performance w/o that index.