DBOS: A database-oriented operating system
I understand conceptually how you could architect a desktop/server OS based on a local database instead of a local filesystem, and it's deeply intriguing to me in terms of how everything could share a common data language that is far more flexible than files but far more structured than text. Presumably things like terminal output would be formatted as query results instead of text. The database wouldn't reside in files on disk, it would reside directly in blocks on disk and in-memory as required.<p>But this seems to be proposing a <i>distributed</i> database that runs <i>across</i> computers, which confuses me. Anything that runs <i>across</i> computers seems to me to be application-level, not OS-level, by definition. What does it even mean to be running a distributed database on "microkernel services" instead of on fully-fledged OS's? And then... where is the OS-level CPU coming from? If the database is distributed among computers then fine, but which computer is "running" the OS?<p>Both the nomenclature and distributed aspect are really throwing me off here.