Comment by cmrdporcupine

Unfortunately I don't agree. I say unfortunately because I personally believe the knowledge model underlying a relational database system is a beautiful and fundamentally superior method of information management.

But I also have traveled enough roads in this industry to know that heterogeneity of approaches ends up defining actual practice -- for better and for worse -- and the "universality" of fopen/fread/fwrite/fclose of blobs of data is going to be hard to move away from.

I'd say that the only way that the "database" takes over the filesystem is by basically dropping to the lowest common denominator and becoming more like a filesystem; basically a key-value store. Throwing away the benefits of what a good database offers. Mainstream databases (in the form of SQL) only do a subset of what's possible with the relational model that Date&Codd laid out decades ago. I fear a move into a lower level of the stack would only worsen this.

In fact I think the trend is kind of going the other way. Filesystems are slowly adopting more and more of the storage techniques that came out of DB research, but using them for the fairly anemic storage Unix FS storage model. Because that's basically what the industry is asking for.

Further, I think there remains a poverty of knowledge about databases generally in the industry. I don't have a CS degree myself, but almost everyone I know (outside of my current employer) who does have one has said some variant of this to me: "I didn't take any/many DB classes in school." Knowledge of the relational data model is weak/thin in our industry (the low point being the "NoSQL" wave a decade ago). And within CS academia, it seems that R&D in this field is mostly centred around Europe (with the notable exception in North America being the excellent programme @ CMU.)

Disclaimer: Employed by a database company.