Comment by monstermonster
11 years ago
Counterpoints to show that it is just a compromise: The complexity of unicode, collation, encoding, translation, language.
However you're 100% right!
Our application actually used text files on a network share with an indexer over the top as the database engine a long time ago. It worked really well and integrated with NT security and file locking for concurrency control, plus it was very easy to back up. A work of genius. However, NTFS doesn't scale well with lots of small files as it stores them in the MFT so it fell off a cliff eventually.
Counter-counterpoint: all of your counterpoints exist or have equivalents in every other form of communication. You swap unicode (which is nearly universally agreed on) for H.264/Theora/VP8 and AAC/Vorbis/Opus, and you still have to deal with collation and translation/language (which, without transcription to text first, is pretty hard).
Would your app have been feasible then with something like SQLite?
We used something similar in the end I.e. SQL Server Compact Edition and sync the data with a master SQL Server instance.
i seen companies get around that limitation by storing multiple files into a compact file
Yeah we do that now. We store them in a big file in pages that contain rows and an externally visible network process allows us to manipulate the things.
(sql server)