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7 reasons to choose a file system over a database for managing your data
- throwaway2016a 10y agoThis is content marketing for SolFS so clearly bias but I can appreciate the article. One place I might take issue is the "easy backup" part. This may be true in SolFS, I don't know. But the reason backing up databases is hard is because you have to deal with writes happening during backup if you want to avoid downtime. Thus you need locks and logs. Rsync helps with this on the filesystem side but I don't see a mention of it. In fact every disk-backed database I've seen you can just do a copy of the folder for a backup iff (not typo) you stop the database first so you know there won't be writes. Also, the statement "In DBMS to have versioning you need to maintain a separate table or two as there are no built-in mechanisms for versioning." is not true for many NoSQL databases (and possibly some SQL databases). The "Exposure to other applications" is also a bit of fluff. A file system driver is still "external assistance" and for the many NoSQL databases that allow a REST interface it is easy to deal with. This article should probably be "7 reasons to choose a file system over a relational database for managing your data" as many of the arguments don't apply to most NoSQL solutions. Sorry, I got up on the wrong side of the bed. Their products actually look pretty nice. Although I prefer open source for code audit-ability and accountability I would consider their products. But this article doesn't convince me not to use a database. Some quick feedback, the product pricing is terribly complicated, I kind of gave up.