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
It has been tried and found to be way more trouble than it is worth.
If you think about the use cases for file systems and databases, they are very different. Of all of the file “opens” performed by a computer 99.99999% of them, the location of the file is known…only when the users need to find a file, is a search done.
Given this simple fact, using a bolt-on DB for user files, like Microsoft has done, seems to be a good balance.
One former directory structure that is now a simple DB is LDAP. A lot of people do not remember where they were on the directory, so end up searching anyway. Sinlge key DBs like NoSQL is awesome for this case.
Latest Answers