I can be wrong, but being in a state of marriage with Y is a fact.
And since the DB handle time periods, with my way you can actually search who X is married to with one request, without checking if he divorced, if Y is dead, disappeared, or else.
> I can be wrong, but being in a state of marriage with Y is a fact.
This is akin to your bank storing the total amount of your account in their database, instead of the transaction history and deriving the total from that.
There's nothing wrong with that, until there is.
Consider this situation: X marries Y, divorces, marries again. Now you would have the date of divorce prior to the date of marriage. How do you make sense of this data?
> And since the DB handle time periods, with my way you can actually search who X is married to with one request, without checking if he divorced, if Y is dead, disappeared, or else.
The fact Y is dead doesn't mean X wasn't married to it. So despite the obvious technical implications of keeping all this data in sync (e.g., Y dies so you would update X to reflect that?), you're simply obliterating information. A fact is immutable, therefore a fact database, by definition, only appends, never updates.
