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.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.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.