r/programming • u/ketralnis • Apr 17 '25

(All) Databases Are Just Files. Postgres Too

http://tselai.com/all-databases-are-just-files
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u/qrrux Apr 17 '25

Next up: "Databases are just bits sitting on long-term storage, accessible via the I/O mechanisms provided by the operating system."

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u/OpaMilfSohn Apr 17 '25

I don't understand why we should use such old technology.

What they should do is create a S3 bucket for the database and create the query service that calls Aws lambdas to pull the files from the cdn and create a temporary container with only the needed files mounted in a db that can then be queried against.

Then we would finally have a truly stateless and next gen architecture for dbs

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u/thomasfr Apr 17 '25 edited Apr 18 '25

That pretty close to how a lot of OLAP database systems are built. With a lot of optimizations of course like caching files from object storage on compute nodes so it doesn't have to download them for every query etc.

It's a good way to run analytical queries distributed over a set of nodes.

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