Faster than the filesystem (2021)
That a database is faster than a nominal file system has been known for quite a while. It can't quite replace them though. Microsoft tried really hard to have database for their root filesystem, investing a lot of time and effort but ultimately it fizzled, why? Important edge cases (like swap) that databases do really poorly.<p>That said, if you're using a file system abstraction for complex and compound documents using a database is a really stellar way to go. In part because it doesn't have the "chunking" problem where allocation blocks are used for both data and metadata in file systems so you pick a size that is least bad for both, versus one "optimum" size for disk io's to keep the disk channel bandwidth highly utilized and the naming/chunking part as records inside that.<p>I wrote a YAML <=> SQLite tool so that apps could use an efficient API to get at component types but the file could be "exported" to pure text. And it worked well in non-UTF string applications. (this was fine for the app which was orchestrating back end processes) At some point it would be interesting to move it to UTF-8 to see how that worked out.