Using Relational Databases as Virtual Filesystems?

Pogie asks: "At my office, we've got what one could only describe as a huge Network attached storage infrastructure. We're talking multiple terabytes of applications, user trees, data files, sybase and oracle databses, etc. 'In the beginning' it was a concious decision to create a shared NFS infrastructure using NetApp Filers (I humbly recommend them over SAN solutions any day...flame on!), but our data center has grown so large, and there are so many interdependencies that we're becoming concerned that if the wrong filer goes down, our production network would be, to say the least, hosed." To combat this problem, Pogie wants to implement his filesystem in a relational database...Oracle to be precise. Read on for his reasoning.

"To conquer our fears we're trying to get a handle on exactly what is where, with the goal of reorganizing the true physical locations of data to minimize the business impact if any single NFS server goes down. At the moment, the plan of attack is to construct a relational Oracle 8.1.6 database on linux which will basically mirror the filesystem in a DB. To accomplish this, I'm writing a horde of scripts using the perl DBI which will poll the entirety of the NFS filesystems on our network and create what basically amounts to a virtual filesystem in the DB which we can then drill into for specific information in much less time than it would take us to search through the actual filesystems in question. In addition, we gain the ability to maintain historical data, which allows us, among other things, to know exactly what went wrong if a luser rm's, mv's, or cp's the wrong thing to the wrong place.

Has anyone tried this before? And is this even a good idea? Does anyone know of existing packages that will do this? I'm really curious what the slashdot community thinks of the idea. I was several hours into this before someone said to me, 'Do you realize you're writing a filesystem in SQL?'"