Blocks

As you might have suspected, the points in time in a flake are not actually dates, they look a little more like this:

Subject	Predicate	Object	Time	Operation
12345	Hair Color	Red	-9	true
12345	Birthday	1/30/85	-9	true
12345	Fav Nums	7	-10	true
12345	Full Name	Jane Doe	-10	true
12345	Fav Nums	28	-10	true
12345	Hair Color	Red	-11	false
12345	Hair Color	Brown	-11	true
12345	Fav Nums	101	-11	true

Transactions that are submitted to the ledger by the same request are atomic. They either all succeed or all fail. That group of transactions is considered a block. Block start with 1, and increase by 1 with each block.

Within each block, individual transactions are given a time, t. t is a more granular notion of time than a block. The order of the ts within a block is the order in which transactions were processed by Fluree.

t is a negative integer, which decreases by one for every transaction. As we see above, there are multiple ts for every block:

Block 2: -9, -10 Block 3: -11

Information like hashes, which ts belong to which block, and what clock time is associated with each block is stored in additional metadata flakes. This is something we'll discuss in a later lesson.

Challenge:

The below two flakes are part of the same block, block 4.

Subject	Predicate	Object	Time	Operation
12345	Eye Color	Green	-12	true
12345	FavNums	0	-13	true