which seems to be Lisp-snobbery which is clearly somewhat justified in theory but almost irrelevant in practice I agree, but you're missing the forest for the

which seems to be Lisp-snobbery which is clearly somewhat justified in theory but almost irrelevant in practice I agree, but you're missing the forest for the trees here. Please accept my arguments in good faith. Do you honestly view ZFS as the be-all and end-all of data storage? For local storage? Right now? Yes, it's the best we have. provided no compelling argument How many filesystems have Merkle trees? You need something like them to avoid phantom reads, phantom writes, and silent corruption. How many filesystems have duplicate metadata blocks, duplicate [what's analogous to] the superblock several times, and can duplicate data a user-specified number of times? And then check their validity using the Merkle tree property above to validate reads? How many filesystems offer free and instant snapshots? As many as you want? Those things are wonderful for databases. How many filesystems offer software RAID? Hardware RAID is a dodgy idea, because it's a complex binary blob in firmware you have no insight into when something goes wrong (speaking from bitter experience, things go wrong). Furthermore some hardware RAID suffers from a write hole. How many filesystems are transactional? And allow you to roll back if a transaction becomes unfixably corrupted? How many can replicate? How many use SSDs efficiently? How many have been in heavy industrial use for years? ZFS has all that (not some of it, that's the point), and more. There's nothing else like it. btrfs probably will be one day as well, but not yet. So, no, it's not ridiculous. I've been down this trail of tears before, and ZFS has made life so much better. At least I don't need to dread a number in my database silently flipping a digit anymore -- if that scenario doesn't give you the hives, then I really don't know what to say.