| The idea of system wide "document database" is really intriguing. I think the author identified a real pattern that could be addressed by such a change: > In fact, many common applications are just text editors combined with data queries. Consider iTunes, Address Book, Calendar, Alarms, Messaging, Evernote, Todo list, Bookmarks, Browser History, Password Database, and Photo manager. All of these are backed by their own unique datastore. Such wasted effort, and a block to interoperability. The ability to operate on my browser history or emails as a table would be awesome! And this solves so many issues about losing weird files when trying to back up. However, I would worry a lot about schema design. Surely most apps would want custom fields in addition to whatever the OS designer decided constitutes an "email". This would throw interoperability out the window, and keeping it fast becomes a non-trivial DB design problem. Anyone have more insights on the BeOS database or other attempts since? (afterthought: like a lot of ideas in this post, this could be implemented in userspace on top of an existing OS) |