[bambax]

A more promising model, used in some systems, is to think of a database as an always-growing collection of immutable facts.

That would already be a huge progress over how databases are currently used; if records were in fact immutable many problems would be instantly solved.

[hyc_symas]

You would just be trading them for the intensely ugly problem of garbage collection. Disk space is cheap, but it's not infinitely cheap. There are plenty of append-only data stores out there now, and they all suffer from compaction-related performance issues.