Actually, having a database on top of an FS is really useful. It's a Content Addressable Storage system. One of the problem home users have is that they are putting more and more of their lives in digital format. Users need a way to organize and search all that info in some sort of meaningful way. Imagine having thousands of photos spread all over your filesystems with nothing but filenames associated with them. That's not too easily searchable or organized.
Imagine all the objects stored on your filesystem have tags associated with them or other metadata that is required at save time. Then you can start doing things like virtual folders. Imagine a folder on your windows desktop that says "Steely Dan" and when you click it runs a query shows you all the music files on your computer by Steely Dan and pretends to be an explorer windows. or a virtual folder that says "Springbreak 2008 pics" and when you click it it goes through all your gagillion photos and creates an explorer window of just the spring break pics. Today, you'd have to tag the Metadata yourself as you put content on your computer, but Microsoft has other initiatives to do facial recognition in photos and some other things to go along with the Content addressable storage system. There's a lot of uses for Content Addressable Storage systems including revision control and some other things that home users can benefit from. At the Enterprise level, such a system would be something like the 5800(Honeycomb) from Sun. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
