Not really a new idea to use a VCS as a document database, other folks have back-ended Wikis and document management systems with SVN, for example. It's not th

Not really a new idea to use a VCS as a document database, other folks have back-ended Wikis and document management systems with SVN, for example. It's not the same thing. Using SVN as a document database is equivalent to using the filesystem as a document database. The only thing extra you get with SVN is a revision history. Git actually is a content database. Its version control capabilities are built on top of that. When you do a checkout on a traditional VCS you're telling the VCS to apply patch set x to the file system. When you do a git checkout you're telling git to load content x from the database into the filesystem.