Response to Alex Payne: In Defense of "Everything Buckets"

I saw your comment in the original thread. Like you, I enjoyed reading Alex's thoughts on the subject, but his was a poorly thought out rant. Your diplomatic response actually brings a lot more to the table.

I'm also reminded of the proliferation of document-oriented DB technology. The relational model is powerful, and has a theoretical elegance that will not likely be replaced. Nevertheless, there are reasons no one's implemented a true RDBMS, and there are practical reasons (legitimate or not) that people fudge on the relational model, or decide to go direcly to the "Everything Hash" model.

An early 'Everything Bucket'-like approach was called 'Lifestreams':

http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

I still think the document-organization metaphors of the future will drift more towards a Lifestreams-like model over time, and away from traditional structured/hierarchical filesystems.

We have the cycles to spare, and convenience for the users ultimately trumps convenience to computers (or even programmers).