What you're saying seems to be to have a data structure where the same data
can be accessed in both the filesystem style and the RDBMs style. How does
that work? How is the mapping done between both structures? Slapping a
filesystem on top of a RDBMs doesn't do that does it?
Most filesystems are basically databases already, just differently
structured and featured databases. And so far most of them do their job
pretty well. You move a folder/directory somewhere, and everything inside
it moves. Tons of data are already arranged in that form. Though porting
over data from one filesystem to another is not always straightforward,
RDBMSes are far worse.
Maybe what would be nice is not a filesystem based on a database, rather
one influenced by databases. One with a decent fulltextindex for data and
filenames, where you have the option to ignore or not ignore
nonalphanumerics and still get an indexed search.
Then perhaps we could do something like the following:
select file.name from path "/var/logs/" where file.name like "%.log%' and
file.lastmodified > '2000/1/1' and file.contents =~ 'te_st[0-9]+\.gif$' use
index
Checkpoints would be nice too. Then I can rollback to a known point if I
screw up ;).
In fact the SQL style interface doesn't have to be built in at all. Neither
does the index have to be realtime. I suppose there could be an option to
make it realtime if performance is not an issue.
What could be done is to use some fast filesystem. Then we add tools to
maintain indexes, for SQL style interfaces and other style interfaces.
Checkpoints and rollbacks would be harder of course.
Cheerio,
Link.
