-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2008-12-10 at 18:58 -0800, John Andersen wrote:
For instance relational database concepts have been around for some time for categorising data and while it makes sense to organise computing executable structures in trees, why are we still organising our documents in this manner?[1]
Why? Because file systems have proven themselves more reliable than database oriented approaches, and a close copy of what people do in the physical world.
We store documents (contracts, deliverables, schedules) in our files organized by projects, in folders, in drawers. Its simple, and even though finding ALL schedules is a bit of a mad-thrash, its do-able. Nothing but mindless duplication of documents allows us to look one place to find all schedules, or all deliverables across the entire engineering division.
If we could trust databases not to come totally unglued losing ALL OUR DATA we might keep out files in such a structure, and be able to find it 50 different ways without duplication.
But there is nothing in the real world that comes close to that.
Further, storage and retrieval are not desktop elements, and unless/until all users use KDE it would be inappropriate to build this functionality only into the desktop.
You know, reiserfs 4 intended to close the gap: more or less, use the filesystem as a database. It doesn't seem likely they will ever finish it, though. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAklBAOcACgkQtTMYHG2NR9V5VQCZATiA1KwsRAnXr5ATjBlDdrZ1 InwAnjuKQSKDO0llddrr8A1veZEiIB6L =MR6/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org