I'm only a few minutes into it, but so far the tl;dr is:
"There are lots of things we do with respect to databases simply because of the limitations of our databases. Here are some things that could be made far simpler if you just had a better database."
Yes it's partly a sales presentation for Datomic, but you could do worse than be sold by Rich Hickey.
- Rich's whole view on the world is pretty consistent with respect to this talk. If you know his view on immutability, values vs identity, transactions, and so forth, then you already have a pretty good idea about what kind of database Rich Hickey would build if Rich Hickey built a database (which, of course, he did!)
- The talk extends his "The Value of Values" keynote [1] with specific applicability to databases
- Further, there is an over-arching theme of "decomplecting" a database so that problems are simpler. This follows from his famous "Simple made easy" talk [2]
- His data product, Datomic, is what you get when you apply the philosophies of Clojure to a database
I've talked about this before, but I still think Datomic has a marketing problem. Whenever I think of it, I think "cool shit, big iron". Why don't I think about Datomic the same way I think about, say, "Mongodb". As in, "Hey, let me just download this real quick and play around with it!" I really think the folks at Datomic need to steal some marketing tricks from the NoSQL guys so we get more people writing hipster blog posts about it ;-)
I haven't watched the video yet either, but I'm guessing he's talking about Datomic's design, which would make this a good place to start: http://docs.datomic.com/architecture.html
