UNIX: treat everything like a filesystem This post: treat everything like a SQL database What's important is that those two EXTREMELY important paradigms of d

UNIX: treat everything like a filesystem This post: treat everything like a SQL database What's important is that those two EXTREMELY important paradigms of data organization basically don't support each other without kludges galore. Hierarchical vs relational But, fundamentally I agree with the poster, what we want are powerful proven data models and powerful proven access languages (SQL for relational, for hierarchical, I'll just throw out XPath which is basically the ONLY good thing from the era of XML that I liked). Graph could potentially be considered, but IMO it has never proven itself in the practical marketplace. In particular it has no proven and stabilized query language in wide use by people that aren't domain experts, unlike users of the filesystem (basically everyone with a computer) and (less universally) users of databases.