Sqlitefs: SQLite as a Filesystem

There's a recursive CTE joke in here somewhere

I was just thinking the same thing.. Im supposed to be on holidays but damn it I need to test this.

IMO in this fantasy it should go like (1-.35)^n, not 1-.35n. We must keep our harebrained schemes plausible.

I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I'm a bit sad that the project didn't go anywhere forever and then was cancelled. They had some pretty ambitious and interesting ideas for it.

E.g. the only public beta of Vista that had it enabled used the database as a backing store for Outlook contacts. Each contact was an object in the database. So were photos. And you could link - as I recall, I only read about it back then - people to photos. And then search on that data, of course. Like, "give me all emails, documents, and photos that have to do with person X, from 2022-2023".

But IIRC, the performance was atrocious. They might have been able to fix that, but instead it ended on the junk heap of unrealized ideas.

I think I interviewed with that team (or tried to at least) - it had great concepts, but the limited leadership I met on that one seemed unlikely to actually get to product (I say with 20 years retrospection) - they were stuck on sql when it needed a directory, but the directory couldn't scale to handle filesystems. Both have since been fixed, but I think the idea is well dead in MS

I use this today on my Raspberry Pis to load the logs and other active IO to memory and avoid wearing out the SD card.

Videogames have gotten so ridiculously huge nowadays, we’ll be at the prosumer/workstation cusp to make this work nowadays.

It turns out if you run SQLiteFS on SQLiteFS, performance increases exponentially, and as the number of SQLiteFS layers increases, seek and read times asymptotically approach zero. In other words, this is the world’s first O(0) file system.

At this rate, with only a few performance tweaks, SQLiteFS should be able to retrieve files before you even ask for them.

Jokes aside, if I understand correctly it's still assumed the performance increase from the sqlLite is down to the reduced number of OPEN and CLOSE calls. So if that's the case, then it will be as slow as however many sqllites you're running? Meaning it should in theory lose performance?!

When have you last updated your filesystem?

Are they? From my experience from databases and some limited from filesystems I would disagree. Sure, there are some similarities but not that much.

Where do you get that from? In my practice this was never true and still is not.

> Filesystems are DB like structures these days anyway.

I think you're confusing the fact that an application uses data structures with that application being like a database.