Comment People seem confused... (Score 1) 607
About what a Folder is. Do you think your hard disk is divided into little named areas where all your files are kept? No, your bits are scattered all over those platters. Your filesystem already is a database, albeit a limited flat file database. Or should I say FAT file database (File Allocation Table, and yes, extfs2 has those too).
The issue is that your FAT (database only lets you assign one location key to each instance of a file, while a nicer database will let you assign it many different pieces of metadata.
When you "save a file in a folder" you are labeling that file with a simple piece of metadata - the folder name. When you "open a folder" you are calling up every file with that label, and no, they generally won't be right next to each other on your hard disk. If you have more sophisticated metadata tagging ability, you can just "save it into multiple folders", or just the same ones you would have anyway, why is that such a confounding paradigm shift for people?
So the issue is, do you do this in userspace, with the same old FAT in the background? Or do you replace FAT with something nicer? Spotlight (unless I am mistaken) is a userspace tool on top of a standard FAT type filesystem, while Apple is proposing moving to a relational database for the actual low-level filesystem, at the kernel level. In that case, I don't see why you can't browse folders uing your favorite Finder or Explorer whether they are database, FAT, or other. Userspace tools might not have that feature, but if a database is your kernel's filesystem, then whats the difference to you? You can search and/or browse a regular filsystem, a database just makes the search part much nicer.
The issue is that your FAT (database only lets you assign one location key to each instance of a file, while a nicer database will let you assign it many different pieces of metadata.
When you "save a file in a folder" you are labeling that file with a simple piece of metadata - the folder name. When you "open a folder" you are calling up every file with that label, and no, they generally won't be right next to each other on your hard disk. If you have more sophisticated metadata tagging ability, you can just "save it into multiple folders", or just the same ones you would have anyway, why is that such a confounding paradigm shift for people?
So the issue is, do you do this in userspace, with the same old FAT in the background? Or do you replace FAT with something nicer? Spotlight (unless I am mistaken) is a userspace tool on top of a standard FAT type filesystem, while Apple is proposing moving to a relational database for the actual low-level filesystem, at the kernel level. In that case, I don't see why you can't browse folders uing your favorite Finder or Explorer whether they are database, FAT, or other. Userspace tools might not have that feature, but if a database is your kernel's filesystem, then whats the difference to you? You can search and/or browse a regular filsystem, a database just makes the search part much nicer.
