[marginalia_nu]

A filesystem is a database.

[andix]

But a special kind of database, that is usually bad with a lot of small entries, especially if they don't have a hierarchy (many files in one folder). Most SQL or NoSQL databases are much better at organizing small "files".

[marginalia_nu]

The difficult use case isn't many files in a folder, it's just many files period.

[amelius]

So what people think of as a database is a database inside a database?

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah. It's like that old Xzibit meme.

File systems aren't relational databases, but more like NoSQL half a lifetime before it was cool. They're typically backed by the same data structures and solve the same problems.

[samus]

Indeed, some database servers (Oracle IIRC) don't use a filesystem, but write to a filesystem partition directly.