It's really a shame the database is not at the base of what we're doing. We're inventing and re-inventing tons of file formats and ways to persist data without

It's really a shame the database is not at the base of what we're doing. We're inventing and re-inventing tons of file formats and ways to persist data without using the database, we have to eternally worry about race conditions in the file system and stuff, and all the while most of our concerns would be well served by an RDBMS. To be sure we still need file formats and persisting data to files so we can conceptually, read, understand, and pass around our data but when we work on it, when we deal with data, we should most of the time do that with a database. Except we don't. Just look at the mess that querying installation data from APT is. Startup time, functionality and search time of the synaptic GUI are abysmal.