On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 04:30:14PM +1300, Brad Beveridge wrote: > 1) I want to put my files in a directory, not some hand wavey natural > language description - who knows where they might end up? > 2) Won't a DB as a filesystem promote less organisation in the directory > structure?
erm, having a db as your filesystem won't necessarily make your directories go away. given that we have organized data in directories since who knows how long that paradigm is sure to stay. having a db really just means having additional means to find your data. > 3) Will having a searchable DB actually decrease the amount of > information you need to remember to get your data? it will increas the amount of ways you can search your data. consider emails. you want to search them by sender or subject maybe. currently to do that your mailprogram has to read the whole mailbox, which, if you have lots of mails, and more so if you are using maildir, can take a lot of time. you could gain a lot by being able to query the directory to only give you the files which have a certain subject. > Well organised directories are going to beat this system anything, IMHO. you are comparing directories with traditional relational databases that you have to access manually. a database filesystem will of course map your directories so you won't notice. hide all the complexities of a database, while providing hooks to take advantage of them. besides that you are completely forgetting the existans of object-databases, which in my opinion would be a perfect match for filesystems. (each directory is an object that contains other objects) a db filesystem really just means the ability to have aribitrary metadata on your files, and more efficient ways to search for that. (note, arbitrary metadata is already possible on ext3 and others to some degree, but they are not efficiently searchable i believe.) also we have not touched the subject of virtual directories yet. greetings, martin. -- interested in doing pike programming, sTeam/caudium/pike/roxen training, sTeam/caudium/roxen and/or unix system administration anywhere in the world. -- pike programmer working and travelling in europe open-steam.org unix system- bahai.or.at iaeste.(tuwien.ac|or).at administrator (stuts|black.linux-m68k).org is.(schon.org|root.at) Martin B�hr http://www.iaeste.or.at/~mbaehr/
