Benefits
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A systematic approach for managing history data. Simplified development. Enhanced data source.
Without Time Travel
Without Time Travel
With Time Travel
With Time Travel
Insulate from
Insulate from
Complexity
Complexity
The above diagram is self explanatory. All the key components of solution development have costly resource associated with the development and maintenance of enterprise data and processes. Why? Because all these things get complex and therefore costly. The ideal remedy is to have lower cost infrastructure take the strain, reducing the burden of complexity normally carried by developers.
Elevate to
Elevate to
Current View
Current View
Once the lower cost infrastructure takes on the burden of complexity, costs reduce and speed and ease of development result. At the heart of this remedy is the infrastructure acting as an autonomous Time Machine with the developers directing the Time Machine to store new data or report on what is already there i.e. developers get elevated to conductors and the infrastructure becomes the orchestra!
Charting the benefits of Time Travel
Charting the benefits of Time Travel
It is well recognised that many of the standard requirements for business systems are not provided “out of the box” by any of the RDBMS providers and that the development process and ultimately the development teams have the job to address these "missing" aspects. To achieve digital transformation requires significant changes to the development process through lowering the cost and simplifying the process. The reality is that the mainstream database providers don’t offer anything significantly different or special. By way of example, the chart below shows the indicative costs and complexity for delivering key business functions.
Central to these functions is the role of the timestamp. Business data without a timestamp is meaningless. Whether implicitly or explicitly stated all data input and all reporting has the parameter requirements to readily provide "the period of effect of the data" (business time) and "when the data was known by the system" (transaction time).
Time Travel is a refreshing and much needed approach for the development process. By enabling the data modelling phase to be in the current view paradigm (and free of the time dimensions) and providing functions which autonomously enable the data entry to be policed in the context of time, the benefits of Time Travel become a development reality. The fact that data entry is policed by the infrastructure makes reporting easier in two crucial ways. Firstly, the entered data doesn’t have logical inconsistencies (eg a period when something disappears or has multiple conflicting states in its life cycle) and secondly the data is stored in an accessible structure in respect to time and therefore makes it easy to identify the dataset (eg if 1000 rows are relevant for a report, the Time Travel capability select process only touches 1000 records and does it very elegantly!)
Time Travel makes the development process easier and less expensive. When it comes to the time dimensions of business data, having Time Travel where the infrastructure takes the strain means the developer is immediately released to focus on the high value area of business logic.
Insulate from
Insulate from
Complexity
Complexity
The normal approach for solutions providing regulatory compliance involves complex, resource intensive solution development. This is because tackling the challenges of data in the context of time puts developers in the weeds of coding. The ideal alternative, which is now a reality, is to insulate the developer from this through an infrastructure which autonomously generates the code which would otherwise have to be written.
Elevate to
Elevate to
Current View
Current View
The ideal situation for a developer is to work at a level where the main focus is on the business logic. The value of focusing on business logic is that it delivers improvements to competitive advantage and intellectual property. By elevating the developer out of the weeds of "technical challenges", the developer is now able to best maximise their talents in the areas which add most business value.
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