Comment by pjc50

> instead of databases using their own data serialisation formats for persistence and then optimizing writes and read over that they should just utilize the FS directly and let all of the optimisations built by FS authors be taken advantage of.

The original article effectively argues the opposite: if your use case matches a database, then that will be way faster. Because the filesystem is both fully general, multi-process and multi-user, it's got to be pessimistic about its concurrency.

This is why e.g. games distribute their assets as massive blobs which are effectively filesystems - better, more predictable seek performance. Starting from the Doom WAD onwards.

For an example of databases that use the file system, both the mbox and maildir systems for email probably count?