Aspies For Freedom

I've been preaching this idea on and off for 15 years now, and no one's been listening.  Now all of a sudden Microsoft is claiming it's their big idea.  I just found this site and I think that maybe this is the right venue to pitch the idea.

Take a good relational database and make it run on an unformatted hard drive partition.  Add some security features as needed.  Use it as your filing system.  Write a "normal" filing system interface to it so every program in the world can use it.  Then give a set of query tools.  With a little easy SQL you can keep a scrolling window of "most recent documents" that goes back to the beginning of time and can be filtered by anything.

You have several tables:
  Location  (directory, compound file like a database, archive, etc.)
  FileName (a file within a location)
  File (the actual file data)
  Block (just like a block in a normal file system)
Locations contain file names.
Files contain blocks.
Users can set up their own indexes if they want, but here are some you should start with:
  Location.ParentLocation (for use by ls and such)
  Location.Name (for searching)
  FileName.Location (for use by ls and so on)
  FileName.Name  (wow - find any file anywhere instantly by what its name starts with)
  FileName.type FileName.Name
  FileName.CreationDate
  FileName.AccessDate
  FileName.ModifyDate

Since blocks have to have a physical size and a size used, you could even use this kind of filing system to insert data into the middle of a file without having to move everything that followed.  Just insert some blocks in the middle and go.

The possibilities are endless.  Just think of the cool file management tools you could write if it were all just SQL to do the hard work.

Anyone interested?

I pondered a more complex scheme a while ago and began work on coding an entire OS based on this "database filesystem" concept - in my vision there would be no applications only capability sets.

In other words, instead of downloading a word processor you'd download a text editing capability and install it.

Yeah, I worked on something like that back in the mid-90's with some guys from Europe.  We would have radically blurred the lines between OS,  application and data.

Security was great, better than Java or Javascript, and admin was a real open question.

In the mid 90s I would have been still learning BASIC damn you!

I was learning BASIC in the late 70's, so don't feel bad.  I must be 150 years older than you.  

Have you checked the ZFS. By far it provides the most advanced features, security and integrity in comparison with any other FS.

Looks like somebody FINALLY figured it out.