The filesystem is your friend

Sometimes all you need is to just persist some data, and not really search it or make relations with it in any way. Sometimes you just want an index of some MP3 metadata, or something of the like. Thus, you can turn to your buddy, the file system. Sometimes making your data relational, and doing advanced views with it is something that adds little value to your data, thus can be disregarded.

I got the inspiration to use the filesystem more often from my job. We have an application that processes loads and loads of data that is not inherently relational. There is so much intermediate data that is processed before we actually get to the end-result, and the data is transformed so much, that with the current database-design we use now, there are countless unnecessary database transactions. This data serves well as being serialized to disk, when need be. The data that we process does not need to be shared, or distributed, or kept under any solid constraints, because it will never be used by other applications! The only thing we really need is a data store, and the filesystem is just the tool for the job.

I’ve decided to make my Jacolyte website filesystem based, as it is just a large index of music, and searching it I’m delegating to Google.