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Comment by prox

3 years ago

Q: Isn’t the filesystem of a system a sort of database? Not in the sense of a query back-and-forth, but in the sense of holding all file records and locations.

The cool part about DBs is interleaving storing/manipulating and querying. A raw hard drive is already a DB by just allow you to write to them in that sense, but no one would consider them a decent DB.

  • Not all databases are relational, even though many are. Filesystems are definitely strongly overlapping with what you'd consider a document-oriented NoSQL database.

    The underlying datastructures are really the same in a filesystem and a database in every way that matters.

  • But you can store, manipulate, and query data in a filesystem. That's what it's for.