A more promising model, used in some systems, is to think of a database as an always-growing collection of immutable facts.
That would already be a huge progress over how databases are currently used; if records were in fact immutable many problems would be instantly solved.
You would just be trading them for the intensely ugly problem of garbage collection. Disk space is cheap, but it's not infinitely cheap. There are plenty of append-only data stores out there now, and they all suffer from compaction-related performance issues.
That would already be a huge progress over how databases are currently used; if records were in fact immutable many problems would be instantly solved.