Why don’t we write a database file system? Isn’t a file system practically a database already? Isn’t layering an OS between the data and the database application slowing things down?
In: Engineering
One big reason is that file systems came before databases, and the major mainframe and microcomputer operating systems all were built on the concept of the file system as the most fundamental representation of data. When databases came along they, like all other applications, built on the abstract building blocks given to them by the OS in the file system. Commercial databases were only available on expensive mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s, and many folks “rolled their own” data storage software until the late 70s/early 80s, when SQL-based RDBMS software started becoming more popular. The first several years of my programming career was spent maintaining custom database software that was built directly on top of TANDEM’s file system, including handling converting records from their in-memory representation to blocks that could be written to disk. Things have changed a lot, but fundamentally most applications still want a file system that looks pretty much like it always has
As others have mentioned NoSQL and other innovations have come along that are close to what you’re describing, but for most applications it’s not useful to throw out the paradigm we’ve built on for computer data storage.
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