MySQL FS

xcyber writes "Developer, Database Admin and user, MySQL is developing an mysql filesystem for Linux to mount database on Linux as a fs. This is still in development stage and the development team would like to receive comment on this. So please let us know. " "Because you can" dammit. Thats just plain awesome.

Comments

Liquid file system

[William Tanksley]

This is exciting on a number of levels, even if the specific database being used isn't my choice; I've been looking for a suitable base for some of my ideas regarding a "fluid file system" (someone else generated a good writeup, calling their ideas a liquid file system, but my name is better :-).

In my vision, 'documents' would be categorised, and the categories could be viewed in a manner very similar to how we now view directories, except that a file is in more than one folder at a time. A file which is named /etc/wtanksle/ppp.conf could also be referred to as /wtanksle/etc/ppp.conf, or if it's unambiguous, /etc/ppp.conf. /dev/removable gives the list of all removable devices; /dev/scsi gives the SCSI devices (including the removable ones).

The potential uses are many -- I think it would make a lot of common computer tasks a lot easier.

Oh well -- anyhow. :-)

-Billy

Is MySQL ready for that?

[Trinition]

No offense to MySQL, but is it ready for such a task? Last I heard, MySQL didn't have record-level-locking except in some experimental forks. Are there any features lacking from MySQL that might make another database more appropriate (ignoring for the moment the license of them).

Re:More like BeOS's filesystem?

[Shadowlion]

No. I believe BeOS just has a meta attribute at the FS level filled with supposed attributes.

BeOS doesn't have one big clump of data that is partitioned; it has a lot of little bits of data. There is nothing "supposed" about the attributes.

For instance, an "MP3" datatype might have fields for Artist, Title, Album, Year, and Comments. You could then search for any song with the word "Land," performed by a group with "Men" in their name, on any album between the years 1982-1988, with the phrase "sounds like crap" in the comment field.

There's no way to actually define a new field at the FS level.

Sure there is. Preferences->Filetypes allows you to add new attributes to a particular filetype, as well as define new filetypes. It's up to the associated applications to do anything meaningful with the new field or fields, but you can pretty much do what you want.

On the command line, I don't think you can manipulate a global filetype. However, for individual files, you can add your own attributes, delete existing ones, and so on.

Early version of BeOS did use a database FS for the entire system but they dropped it by R4 (I think that's the right version) because of performance issues.

The early versions of BeOS used a separate database (not very complex) and filesystem, which wound up being very difficult to work with, so eventually they merged the two. The "database" aspects of the BeOS filesystem are more of being able to add (relatively) arbitrary data to particular filetypes, and do searching based on those criteria. It isn't a formal database in any sense of the word.


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