@sdegutis: it depends also on what you actually want back, and whether or not you want the presence of the attributes specified in the pull to affect whether or not the entity is returned by the query. A write up on some of the differences is here: http://docs.datomic.com/best-practices.html#use-pull-to-retrieve-attribute-values

@bkamphaus: :db.error/tempid-not-an-entity tempid used only as value in transaction. can you shed some light on what this might mean?

i found it. was trying to tx schema with only id and install attrs