Nine terms that are not synonyms
Most arguments about audit systems are vocabulary collisions. Fixing the words fixes half the disagreement.
Lesson 01 of 06 · 8 min
| Term | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| Event log | An ordered sequence of facts, written once, only growing. A storage and consistency mechanism. |
| Audit trail | A rendering, for a human, of who did what, when, under what authority, and why. A product surface. |
| Provenance | The record of entities, activities and agents involved in producing a particular thing. Value-level. |
| Lineage | The structural dependency graph between artifacts. Schema-level. Holds for every row of a run, so explains none of them. |
| Immutable | A property of a record: its bytes never change. Says nothing about deletion. |
| Append-only | A property of a collection: it only grows. Says nothing about member immutability. |
| Tamper-evident | Modification is detectable after the fact by someone doing verification work. |
| Bitemporal | Two independent time axes: valid time (true in the world) and transaction time (recorded in the database). |
| Decision time | The knowledge cutoff a particular actor used when they acted. The axis nobody has a column for. |
You have an "immutable audit log" in a Postgres table. Which property do you actually have?
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