The trouble with symbolic links

Posted Jul 19, 2022 16:24 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: The trouble with symbolic links by mathstuf
Parent article: The trouble with symbolic links

PostgreSQL has support for transactional large objects. To call it a filesystem is a bit of a stretch since objects only have numeric identifiers not names. However, they have permissions, and support open/close/seek/read/write and are all within a transaction. You could certainly build a complete transactional filesystem on top of it.

But this also shows the difficulty, given the amount of work database systems have to do to make transactions work while giving everyone a consistent view and making it perform. Then again, the problem space of filesystems is much simpler.

Even if we supported only transactional metadata changes (rename, move, create, unlink) would be a step up. Certainly being able the work on a fixed snapshot of the filesystem would be good enough for quite a lot of purposes (I think btrfs has this).