Re: Some Laws

After a long battle with technology, jdoherty_at_nowhere.null.not (John Doherty), an earthling, wrote:
> In article <sAC3d.76182$MQ5.9545_at_attbi_s52>, "Marshall Spight"
> <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote:
>
>> Photoshop could really use an RDBMS.
>
> It could? For what?

For storing history information on what files you have edited in the past, for one thing.

Anything that could get written out to a file, which would therefore require a file format and a parser, is a possible candidate for storage in a table in a database namespace.

At present, the SOLE "file model" that people look at is of files being sequences of bytes, addressed essentially seqentially.

In the past, there used to be other models that had more structure than that, between mainframey systems, where everything's mapped onto blocks, and the Digital VMS/FORTRAN way, where files were series of records. Neither were precisely like 'tables', but they certainly had more resemblance to that than today's bland "bags of bytes."

Any time you find yourself needing to look for some sort of parser to extract structure from a Bag O Bytes, it's worth wondering if it would be worthwhile to impose structure in some fashion, and sticking some tables in a database is unlikely to be the worst possible method.

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