[jamwt]

> doesn’t explain what the data model it is proposing actually is in concrete terms.

Fair enough. The goal of the post wasn't necessarily to comprehensively describe the product–so the specifics of what we provide are found elsewhere in our docs, etc.

> Really, the big thing that I see here is the transaction retry logic,

These transactions run as embedded functions inside Convex in a runtime where it is impossible to have side effects.

[dragonwriter]

> These transactions run as embedded functions inside Convex in a runtime where it is impossible to have side effects.

The reason I expressed that the side effect free version would be useful in any engine, and the side effect encompassing one would be useful in any client library, is transaction patterns where external interaction is needed within the transaction are not uncommon. A tradeoff of automatic transaction retries for a constraint that you can never have client-side side effects conducted between operations of a database transactions means you are likely to have to write more higher level business transaction compensation logic around lower-level database transactions. This may, in one respect, have greater conceptual purity, but in practical terms its a trade off, not a pure gain.