On 5/7/2012 9:09 PM, Steve Howell wrote:
On May 7, 8:46 pm, John Nagle<na...@animats.com> wrote:
On 5/6/2012 9:59 PM, Paul Rubin wrote:
Javier<nos...@nospam.com> writes:
Or not... Using directories may be a way to do rapid prototyping, and
check quickly how things are going internally, without needing to resort
to complex database interfaces.
dbm and shelve are extremely simple to use. Using the file system for a
million item db is ridiculous even for prototyping.
Right. Steve Bellovin wrote that back when UNIX didn't have any
database programs, let alone free ones.
It's kind of sad that the Unix file system doesn't serve as an
effective key-value store at any kind of nontrivial scale. It would
simplify a lot of programming if filenames were keys and file contents
were values.
You don't want to go there in a file system. Some people I know
tried that around 1970. "A bit is a file. An ordered collection of
files is a file". Didn't work out.
There are file models other than the UNIX one. Many older systems
had file versioning. Tandem built their file system on top of their
distributed, redundant database system. There are backup systems
where the name of the file is its hash, allowing elimination of
duplicates. Most of the "free online storage" sites do that.
John Nagle
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