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BT wasn't actually billed as "database" internally, until they had to sell it in Google Cloud where the definition of what constitutes a database is much looser
by general_ai 10y ago
BT wasn't actually billed as "database" internally, until they had to sell it in Google Cloud where the definition of what constitutes a database is much looser. Inside Google it's known as a multidimensional hash table.
- paulmd 10y agoI would definitely agree that's a more precise definition. Constraining "database" to only ever refer to RDBMS is what I really have a problem with. But there really isn't a brightline between what's a table, and what's a filesystem, and what's a database. You can put a blob in a database or BigTable, and MongoDB is really close to being a flat file conceptually. You can have a filesystem or database that is content-accessible. You can have a filesystem that is atomic and supports rollbacks and can store relational data like symlinks. A virtual filesystem like LVM can support schema-like volumes on top of it. At the end of the day it's all just technology that lets me abstract my writes so I can deal with a more simplistic model backed by certain guarantees about behavior. I want to write a program that does XYZ, not write a filesystem/database driver. From there it's all just various tradeoffs.