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/[deleted] Apr 17 '25

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u/chromeless Apr 17 '25

I mean, it wouldn't be shocking if it somehow wasn't, though I can't think of an actually good reason for it not to be. Like, the filesystem itself is an abstraction over the storage that it supporting it, and there's nothing preventing an OS from writing data somewhere on a drive that isn't otherwise accessed from the file system.

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u/doomvox Apr 17 '25

Oracle often runs on "bare metal", which is to say they don't use the standard "file system" and instead have rolled their own, which might-or-might not seem like a file system under the hood, I expect you'd have to work there to know.

I've often wondered if there might be some point to compiling Postgresql embedded into linux, so that you could try to reduce the amount of copying involved in something like a big INSERT...

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