beer drinking goes waaaay back

And here's the oldest recorded customer complaint

https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...

Me buying a PlayStation 1 in 1997

You can store whatever ancient timestamp you want in SQLite, its Just Text or Just an Integer although the date library functions may not support it

This isn't just the oldest recorded transaction, it's nearly the oldest known recognizable sample of human writing. Not a love letter or a sermon or a story, but a receipt. This probably reflects their ubiquity rather than importance. There is one known older writing sample, the Kish Tablet of Jemet Nasr. Since that tablet represents lists and counts of goods (barley, oil, livestock), it may also be a receipt, or perhaps an inventory.

The oldest known non-commercial writing is a set of proverbs from around 2600 BCE, Instructions of Shuruppak.

With my luck my most cringe-worthy diary entries will probably last that long.

> Considering this thing survived 5000 years (holy shit!) with zero downtime and has stronger durability guarantees than most databases today.

One could argue that it had 5000 years of downtime when no one knew where it was /s

Some more info:

> This tablet with early writing most likely documents grain distributed by a large temple. Scholars have distinguished two phases in the development of writing in southern Mesopotamia. The earliest tablets, probably dating to around 3300 B.C., record economic information using pictographs and numerals drawn in the clay. A later phase, as represented by this tablet, reflects changes in the techniques of writing that altered the shapes of signs. Symbols stood for nouns, primarily names of commodities, as well as a few basic adjectives, but no grammatical elements. Such a system could be read in any language, but it is generally accepted that the underlying language is Sumerian. Indeed, by the first half of the third millennium B.C., the script had sufficiently developed to faithfully represent the Sumerian language, and the scope and application of writing was expanded to include written poetry. Nonetheless, even these later scribes rarely included grammatical elements, and the texts, created as memory aids, cannot be easily read today.

* https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/327385

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jemdet_Nasr_period

> I call it rock solid durability.

Literally! But this is survivor bias: you only see a piece that remained intact for 5k years, and I bet 99% of them were eroded/destroyed over time.