Very Off Topic...
On 1/7/07 1:11 AM, Joachim Schipper wrote:
Or did you mean something else entirely?
I mean lets start store and retrieve data in a truly universal way.
Now about every different program stores data in files in it's own
database format, in files that are only readable by that sole program
or by "compatible" programs.
We OpenBSD/Unix users can still live with this because ASCII is often
used as base within the most important files and almost all programs
are at least a little "compatible" with it.
It ends up that we are now in a situation that every program has it's
own often very incompatible ways of storing and retrieving data, being
it flags or whatever and it is more and more work to let programs
intercommunicate and we demand more quality (CVS for everything!).
What we need is a storage system that's far more universal for storing
a bit and a blob. We will probably never get rid of "blobs" being it
readable text, foto's or films.
But why are on a distance simple things like backing up a disk such a
headache? Because all programs have own locking, caching and other
systems in place. With a good database file system, with universal
locking etc, this is far easier. If well designed it's a snap to let
it maintain copies of disks on any level. That's not that easy to
design and it will always have to obey laws of physics, but it's
doable and within 20, 40 or more years everything will work with such
a storage system that includes transactions and CVS features for
everything.
Please don't get me wrong, I have high regard for things that work and
OpenBSD again and again proves to work as advertized. What I dreamed
of above is quite some work, but it's doable, it's just re-arranging
what we do and have in a more consistent, more orthagonal, way.
I can say we do produce code in this direction. It's stil for own use
and production the code delivers robust high speed storage and
retrieval of very small and big amounts of data and we are looking for
further interesting applications like a more universal database file
system. (For more interested: it uses an in house developed version of
radix trees and we use it for high speed disk based packet reallignment.)
+++chefren
