Thank you so much for sharing this! That sounds like an equally fun and headache-inducing problem indeed!

The idea that someone could book a room for 400 years of consistency guarantees is somewhat hilarious, yet absolutely the kind of thing that would check a box in a regulated environment like healthcare!

It does speak to a larger issue I see quite often, which is that capturing structured intent as of the time an event is created, with the context that led to that decision, is incredibly hard to model. Because no matter what, something about the system will change, like daylight savings time or assumptions around resource/room availability, in an unpredictable way such that the data that had been used to drive a confident evaluation of lack-of-conflict at insertion time, is now insufficient to automatically resolve conflicts.

There's no single way to solve this problem - in a way, "reinterpreting intent" is why programming is often equal parts archaeology and anthropology. Certainly gives us very interesting problems to solve!

To circle it back to the original conversation: the better our databases are at handling large volumes of written data, the more context we can capture around insertion-time intent in an easy-to-query way, and the better we'll be at adapting to unforeseen circumstances!