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
This was/is a thing with Oracle actually. You can use raw disk, without a filesystem for storing tablespaces, but most DBAs opt not to do it because it makes backups at a filesystem level a huge PITA.
And the filesystem doesn’t add that much overhead in terms of time once the file is opened. In the UNIX world you are either calling the open() syscall against the file and using read/write/seek to navigate and update it’s contents. Or if you use raw disk, you are opening a /dev/diskn file using the same open() syscall and using the same read/write/seek syscalls for queries and updates.
Latest Answers