Supported Operations

The Datomic API allows you to create, list, and delete databases. For more information, see the Client API.

Databases are accumulate-only, and all new information is added by fully serialized ACID transactions. The transact operation takes as its arguments

• a connection to a database
• a collection that can include raw assertions, raw retractions, and transaction functions for conditional operations.

For example, to increase an item's price by 10%, you would pass a transaction function to transact, and two new datoms would be added to the database:

• a retraction of the previous price
• an assertion of the new price

For more information, see transactions.

Schema attributes are ordinary entities in a database, and are added via ACID transactions just like any other data. Schema attributes must be defined in a transaction prior to any transaction that uses them.

For more information, see schema.

The query operation provides access to Datomic Datalog, a powerful deductive query system. Datomic Datalog includes unification, joins, predicates, functions, conjunction, disjunction, negation, and reusable rules.

The pull operation is a declarative way to make hierarchical (or nested) selections of information about entities. pull is integrated in query and also available as a standalone API.

For more information, see query.

Datomic is accumulate-only, remembering the history of all information. The db operation returns the current value of a database. This value can then be filtered:

• the as-of operation filters a database back to a past point in time
• the since operation filters a database to include only datoms after a point in time
• the history operations returns an unfiltered view of all present and past information.

Datomic transactions are reified, that is, transactions are themselves entities in a database. You can use query and pull to retrieve information about transactions associated with an entity. Or you can go in the opposite direction, retrieving datoms from transactions directly via the tx-range operation.

For more information, see time.

Datomic provides direct iteration on indexes. Most applications will not use this, and you should prefer instead the higher-level query and pull operations.

The datoms operation can seek to a point in any index and iterate from there, and the index-range operation can provide a value range from the AVET index.

For more information, see indexes.