"Most of the time, most people don’t need most of the power of bitemporality."
That said, bitemporality does provide us with a useful, rigorously defined mental model to help reason about time-oriented problems, the tools to implement it and, by approaching problems with this in mind, we become aware of edge cases we may have otherwise missed.
Naturally, we'd like to have our cake and eat it: we want the ease and performance of a traditional update-in-place database for everyday transactions and queries, but the safety net of a bitemporal database when we need it - and this is our primary success criterion for XTDB.
That said, bitemporality does provide us with a useful, rigorously defined mental model to help reason about time-oriented problems, the tools to implement it and, by approaching problems with this in mind, we become aware of edge cases we may have otherwise missed.
Naturally, we'd like to have our cake and eat it: we want the ease and performance of a traditional update-in-place database for everyday transactions and queries, but the safety net of a bitemporal database when we need it - and this is our primary success criterion for XTDB.