[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.