> Most of the users I know could care less about the promised features.
> Even the so called "power users" really don't care about their file
> systems (or file formats).  Maybe I have a dark and pessimistic view of
> those who exist in the middle of the bell curve.  That probably is more
> than just possible :)

I'll just comment that this is largely due to not understanding the benefits 
of it.

If you put a million files in a single directory, and then start working with 
them, you'll understand one of the easiest to explain areas where the 
problems lie.  This may not be a big issue today, but it will become one in 
the foreseeable future, as the amount of data created grows, the speed of 
it's creation grows, and the expectation of it's retention also grows.

Even apart from having a large directory listing, look at the solution you'll 
face if you run a FS out of inodes.  This is still a more or less rare event, 
but it's becoming more common all the time.  Note that this happens on EXT2/3 
but doesn't happen back with Reiser3.

Having other data stored in the FS?  Maybe that'll be resolved by the various 
indexers.  We'll see.  But even there, how much faster would that indexing 
be, if it was indexing a database rather than flat files.

For the record, this isn't a new idea either.  I did development work on an 
AS/400 in the 90s, and it had used a database for it's filesystem for years, 
that was it's unique calling, and a large part of the reason it was so 
incredibly efficient at what it did.

On Linux, this was first addressed by Reiser4, which was directly modelled 
after the 400, unfortunately this project seems to have gone by the wayside 
now.  Maybe it'll continue as a project in 20 years to life...

Kev.

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