Good old ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) before DASD (Direct Access Storage Device) took over. (Aren't you glad IBM didn't win the "name the things" con

Good old ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) before DASD (Direct Access Storage Device) took over. (Aren't you glad IBM didn't win the "name the things" contest? :-)) I'm going to guess that by "domain dependency" you're talking about how handle = open("foo.txt"); Looks semantically different than err = db->exec("SELECT * from DIRECTORY where NAME = 'foo.txt';", &result); So yes in that regard they certainly "feel" different, although at some point I needed a file system for an application than built a wrapper layer for sqlite that basically gave you open/read/write/delete calls and it just filled in all the other stuff to convert specialized filesystem calls into general purpose database calls.[1] The best thing you can say about the way UNIX decided to handle files was that it forced people to either use them as is or make up their own scheme within a file itself (and don't get me started on the hell that is 'holey' files) [1] In my case the underlying data storage was a NAND flash chip so the result you got back which was nominally a FILE* like stdio had the direct address on flash of where the bits were. read-modify-write operations were slow since it effectively copied the file for that (preserving flash sector write lifetimes)