Accounting got here first
The framing is claimed, canonically, since 2015. What survives is the part nobody implements.
Before claiming this as an insight, know that it is claimed. Pat Helland, CIDR 2015, has a section titled "Accountants Don't Use Erasers" and another on observed versus derived facts.
The truth is the log. The database is a cache of a subset of the log.
Accountants don't use erasers or they go to jail. All entries in a ledger remain in the ledger. Corrections can be made but only by making new entries… When a company's quarterly results are published, they include small corrections to the previous quarter. Small fixes are OK! They are append-only, too!
Cite him rather than arriving at it. Claiming novelty here is the kind of thing a reader corrects you on in public.
| Accounting | Engineering |
|---|---|
| Entry | Immutable event |
| Transaction | The atomic commit; the unit of consistency |
| Account | Aggregate, or stream identity |
| Balance | The fold |
| Trial balance | A projection, plus its consistency check |
| Period close | A snapshot, made authoritative |
| Journal | The event log |
| Posting rule | The apply function, versioned |
The trial balance is the one row in that table with something engineering almost never implements. What is it?
The rest of this lesson unlocks when you commit above.