Date: 03 Mar 1998 12:54:00 -0600 From: stephen farrell <stephen@farrell.org> To: freebsd hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: hook database into filesystem like BeOS? Message-ID: <87pvk3sj07.fsf@phaedrus.uchicago.edu>
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one nice thing about the BeOS is the database integration with the filesystem. what this means is that all meta-data about files and directories is stored simultaneously in a database. i assume that the two are independant, really, but that the filesystem layer has some hooks it calls to keep the database in sync. the advantages are great: searches across the entire filesystem (say for all files containing the letter "e" that were edited between 2pm and 4pm yesterday) take less than a second, instead of minutes or tens of minutes with find. additionally, updates are "live", so it's not like locate where the file will show up only if it was there the last time updatedb was run. this has some rather impressively neat affects, like if you're at the command line (BeOS much posix compliance), and you rename a file and happen to have the filemanager open on that dir, you'll see the file change. this is nifty and all, but i would also imagine that such a system would be extremely useful for more important issues: e.g., it could also store inode numbers and thus allow an alternative way for applications to access files very quickly (like news server). so my question is: 1. anyone thinking about this? 2. how difficult do you think it would be to get started playing with this--adding hooks to the vfs layer to maintain the state in a rdbms (mysql, postgres, etc)? 3. do you think it might be possible that such a system could be, in principal, integrated with the c library so that applications (e.g., find, file managers) would use it while calling the existing api (analagous to nis vs. passwd file... perhaps a /etc config file telling it whether it should use database, if so what kind, if so which hostname is the database on, etc)? -- Steve Farrell To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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