There have been a few toy filesystems which have explored this. BeOS back in the late 90s came the closest to broad adoption, even though it didn't fully embrac

There have been a few toy filesystems which have explored this. BeOS back in the late 90s came the closest to broad adoption, even though it didn't fully embrace the paradigm, just aspects of it. I think there are a few reasons it hasn't happened: 1. Filesystems are hard. Every new filesystem architecture ends up requiring a large pool of talented developers. 2. Nobody wants to break backwards compatibility. Current filesystem design is so integral to all kinds of software that you just can't expect all software in the world to be updated just to work with a new filesystem paradigm. 3. Databases are also hard, so a database-like filesystem is doubly so. 4. Current filesystem architecture is good enough for most stuff. The pain of continuing to use it isn't as great as the pain of changing it. None of these reasons make a database-like filesystem inherently bad. It's just not practical right now. I think we're moving in that direction though, with things like object storage.