Indexed attribute searching on top of ZFS could be a nice project. I was very interested in WinFS when MS announced some of the features scheduled for Longhorn (aka Vista), and I lost interest in Vista when they dropped WinFS.
Since ZFS is capable of storing files for multiple operating systems (is there anything else comparable for storing files for Unix, Linux, OS/X and Windows?), adding a database query engine could work very well. Yes, there are no client tools to take advantage of it right now, but that's usually the case for things that don't exist :) Rather than starting from scratch, and considering Sun just bought MySQL, would it be possible to create a plug in architecture that allowed an extrernal database to be populated as files are saved? With the ability to add content / metadata indexing tools for different types of file this could be very flexible. I could see some great client tools making use of something like this, and it would be an ideal storage system for an intranet. For admins, a ZFS command to pass SQL queries directly to the MySQL server and return the results would probably do, but on the client side you would need some way of integrating this with applications. However, do you need to integrate MySQL with ZFS to do this, or is it possible to achieve this while keeping them separate? ie: Could programs simply query MySQL as usual, and have MySQL return a path to the file? I don't even see a problem with that path using NFS, CIFS or even FTP. You could even support multiple access paths from a single ZFS pool. Even iSCSI paths might be possible return values (might help people who need to manage a lot of pools). This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
