[HN Gopher] DBOS: A DBMS-oriented Operating System [pdf]
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       DBOS: A DBMS-oriented Operating System [pdf]
        
       Author : matt_d
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2022-01-29 18:09 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (vldb.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (vldb.org)
        
       | tracyhenry wrote:
       | DBOS was presented at the CIDR conference a couple weeks ago:
       | https://youtu.be/L4LsYda9hKU
        
       | indymike wrote:
       | This idea has been around for a while... BeOS allowed for
       | indexing and metadata which allowed you to use the file system a
       | lot like a relational database. It was a really cool feature and
       | made it easy to write software that stored tabular data. MS tried
       | back in the Windows Longhorn era... and gave up on it. I think
       | there's more than one 70s and 80s era big iron OS that did this,
       | too.
       | 
       | The file system has been really hard to get rid of - it hides a
       | surprising lot of details on how bits get read and written from
       | hardware, and that hardware has changed a lot in the past
       | decades. SQLite is a great codebase to look at to see what really
       | goes on there.
        
         | zokier wrote:
         | Filesystem is small aspect here, the big deal here is putting
         | stuff like task scheduling and IPC on top of DBMS. And even for
         | files, the point here is more on having distributed filesystem
         | as first-class citizen and less on being able to do sql-like
         | queries.
        
       | AtlasLion wrote:
       | reminds me a lot of IBM OS400.
        
       | melony wrote:
       | Maybe Google can add a NFS frontend to Spanner, I wonder what
       | that would look like.
        
         | taywrobel wrote:
         | Probably would be better to try this as a layer on top of
         | FoundationDB.
         | 
         | It was kind of designed to be a distributed systems building
         | block that you can develop interfaces on top of without
         | worrying much about implementing the durability, consistency,
         | or distribution of data.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | There was a small thread recently (we invited matt_d to repost):
       | 
       |  _DBOS: A DBMS-oriented Operating System [pdf]_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29803799 - Jan 2022 (6
       | comments)
        
       | CalChris wrote:
       | I remember back in the day, overly Unix people had a mantra, _a
       | filesystem is not a database_ which is kind of a non-sentence
       | like a _Macintosh is not a typewriter_ , also common at the time.
       | 
       | The dominant storage technology then, disks, had structure and
       | performance was determined largely by that structure. Ignoring
       | that structure did not solve the performance problem. I thought
       | that maybe a filesystem actually needed a schema and wrote a
       | semester paper for that for CS262.
       | 
       | Well that went over like a lead balloon. It's less necessary now
       | with SSDs, but I often think that Unix/Linux oversimplifies and
       | then pays technical debt for decades for having adopted a simpler
       | approach than VMS/...
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | It is just another example of all the things UNIX people
         | decided to ignore, yet thanks to Worse is Better, now it is
         | everywhere with plenty of technical debt to fix.
        
         | SigmundA wrote:
         | Seems obvious to me that a file system is a type of hierarchal
         | k/v database.
        
         | GauntletWizard wrote:
         | And the success of VMS in the modern era speaks to that.
        
       | zokier wrote:
       | Feels like someone took hadoop and osquery and smashed them
       | together. And like hadoop it feels like overkill if you don't
       | have a large cluster of computers to distribute work on.
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | These kinds of ideas always remember me of WinFS.
        
       | SigmundA wrote:
       | Maybe one day we will finally get orthogonally persistent os that
       | is not niche: http://tunes.org/wiki/orthogonal_20persistence.html
        
       | mmcgaha wrote:
       | I am sure there are a lot of details that I missed, but this
       | sounds a lot like an IBM i series. If this is free software I can
       | see a market for it. If this is commercial software then . . .
       | well I don't know good luck.
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-29 23:00 UTC)