best small database?

[Blair P. Houghton]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> Blair P. Houghton wrote:
>
> > Can't be any harder than switching between incompatible filesystems,
> > unless you assume it should "just work...".
>
> so what file systems are you using that don't support file names and
> binary data ?

Mmmm, no.

I'm saying that the change from Oracle 9 to Oracle 10 is like changing
from ffs to fat32.

They have different structures related to the location and
identification of every stored object.  Sometimes different storage
structures (block sizes, block organization, fragmentation rules, etc.)
for the insides of a file.

A filesystem is a specialized database that stores generalized data.

The value of a database program and its data storage system is that you
can get the filesystem out of the way, and deal only in one layer of
searching and retrieval.

A DB may be only trivially more efficient when the data are a
collection of very large objects with a few externally associated
attributes that can all be found in the average filesystem's directory
structures; but a DB doing raw accesses on a bare disk is a big
improvement in speed when dealing with a huge collection of relatively
small data, each with a relatively large number of inconsistently
associated attributes.

The tradeoff is that you end up giving your DB vendor the option of
making you have to offload and reload that disk if they change their
system between versions.

--Blair