Database is just a map, it doesn’t have a structure in the sense of e.g. RDBMS. What’s going on is that when you df/load! a component it gets recursively normalized based upon ident and query params and that normalized data is then merged into the database. You can think of initial state as of the data which is normalized and merged on the app start (from the root component).

@U0G3C3USJ i gave a talk on this exact topic recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMbGhgVf9Do

^ video goes into more detail with examples, but in short :ident defines the tables names and identity points of the data, :initial-state specifies how the DB should be initialized only on app start, :query is used for multiple things (loading remote date, normalizing sub-entities, loading UI centric data)

@UDQ2UEPMY @U09FEH8GN Many thanks for the insights - I’ll digest and get back to you guys if I have questions.