I think that most database applications cannot be seen as a monotonically-growing collection of facts, but as a sequence of operations, and those operations don't necessarily commute.
Most of the operations do commute, or almost commute--there are edge cases involving, for example, balances or inventory falling to zero, and with side effects, duplicates, generated ids, timestamps, etc. I think it's difficult for these to be handled automatically, because of semantic issues. For side effects, there have to be compensating actions--charging back credit cards for orders not filled, for example, or sending an email saying, sorry, you're not actually getting the watch. For operations that don't commute, having a batch system isn't going to be adequate.
For actions that do commute, I don't see how having a batch system is necessary. It just means having a third opinion of what the value should be. Unless you have a define down-time, you're introducing more consistency issues.
Also, "online" (as in OLTP), rather than "realtime" is more consistent with standard DBMS terminology.
Most of the operations do commute, or almost commute--there are edge cases involving, for example, balances or inventory falling to zero, and with side effects, duplicates, generated ids, timestamps, etc. I think it's difficult for these to be handled automatically, because of semantic issues. For side effects, there have to be compensating actions--charging back credit cards for orders not filled, for example, or sending an email saying, sorry, you're not actually getting the watch. For operations that don't commute, having a batch system isn't going to be adequate.
For actions that do commute, I don't see how having a batch system is necessary. It just means having a third opinion of what the value should be. Unless you have a define down-time, you're introducing more consistency issues.
Also, "online" (as in OLTP), rather than "realtime" is more consistent with standard DBMS terminology.