Subject: The quantum leap we skipped: a SQL Server database that refuses UPDATE and DELETE - live, try to break it

Here is a heresy: two of the four letters in CRUD are bugs.

Every business system I have worked on lets someone rewrite history. An UPDATE overwrites what was true, a DELETE erases that it ever happened, and the "audit trail" is whatever the application remembered to write. Bookkeepers have corrected their books with reversing entries for centuries - "storno" is their word - and we taught ourselves to edit rows instead. I stopped accepting it.

World is one SQL Server database built on the opposite rules, enforced by the engine itself, not by the application:

Nothing is updated or deleted. The ledger only grows. A mistake is answered by a storno: the same act, its quantity negated, pointing at what it corrects. Both lines stay on the file. Negate what adds up, leave what identifies.

Two people for every change of an agreement. One person claims an amendment, a different person proves it.…