4 ms·
Every single time this has been tried it has gone wrong, but sure. Almost all of the operations done on actual filesystems are not database like, they are clos
by foobiekr 1y ago
Every single time this has been tried it has gone wrong, but sure.
Almost all of the operations done on actual filesystems are not database like, they are close to the underlying hardware for practical reasons. If you want a database view, add one in an upper layer.
- jonhohle 1y agoBeOS got it right with BeFS. An Email client was just a folder. MP3s could be sorted and filtered in the file system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309686
- int_19h 1y agoWindows does something similar with Explorer today when you open a folder that has mostly music files in it.
- foobiekr 1y agoBeFS wasn't a database. It had indexed queries on EAs and they had the habit of asking application files to add their indexable content to the EAs. Internally it was just a mostly-not-transactional collection of btrees. There was no query language for updating files, or even inspecting anything about a file that was not published in the EAs (or implicitly do as with adapters), there were no multi-file transactions, no joins, nothing. Just rich metadata support in the FS.
- Ericson2314 1y agoYeah I am talking more deep architecture, and BeOS is more notable here mostly on just the user-interface level. However, I think it is reasonable to think that with way more time and money, these things would meet up. Think about it as digging a tunnel from both sides of the mountain.
- foobiekr 1y agoMicrosoft poured at least $100M into this hole with nothing to show for it.
- Ericson2314 1y agoThat doesn't disprove anything for me. It just says POSIX DOS lowest common denominator network effects are a hell of a drug. Whenever we're talking about interfaces, coordination success or failure is the name of the game.
- foobiekr 1y agoWhat problem do you think a DB-as-filesystem solves? The only obvious one that makes any sense at all is cross-file transactions.
- Ericson2314 1y agoThe filesystem is a bad database Directories are a shitty underpowered way to organize data? No good transactions Conflation of different needs such as atomic replace vs log-structured I would like to use a better database instead.
- foobiekr 1y agoWould you pay 50x performance decrease?
- Ericson2314 1y agoNo, and I would also not need to.
- adolph 1y ago> they are close to the underlying hardware for practical reasons Could you provide reference information to support this background assertion? I'm not totally familiar with filesystems under the hood, but at this point doesn't storage hardware maintain an electrical representation relatively independent from the logical given things like wear leveling?
- Ericson2314 1y agoYes I agree, that assertion doesn't pass muster. Mature database implementations also bypass a lot of kernel machinary to get closer to the underlying block devices. The layering of DB on top of FS is a failure.
- foobiekr 1y agoYou are confusing that databases implement their own filesystem equivalent functionality in an application-specific way with the idea that FS's can or should be databases.
- Ericson2314 1y agoI am not confusing any such thing. You need to define "database" such that "file system" doesn't include it. Common usage does this by convention, but that's just sloppy thinking and populist extentional definitining. I posit that any rigorous, thought-out, not overfit intentional definition of a database will, as a matter of course, also include file systems.
- foobiekr 1y agoPerhaps so, but in the expansive definition you're using, even an in-memory binary tree qualifies as a database, which makes your point meaningless.
- Ericson2314 1y agoI'm OK including that — tmpfs is similar, but we can easily exclude that by requiring persistence. The intentional definition doesn't need to be expansive the point of being useless!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- packetlost 1y agoI don't see how file systems aren't some sort of DBMS, definitely not relational but that wasn't a stated requirement.
- Ericson2314 1y agoYes, it makes me sad that no everyone is on our level about this