Well, the initial individual project allocations have been published, and it looks like I’ve definitely had my project confirmed. As far as I know, it was going to happen anyway, but it’s nice to have official confirmation now, so I can start working on it.

What is my project? Well, it was my own proposal, and the title is Towards a Database Filesystem, which may give you a clue. The aim of this project is to build a database filesystem that can store various elements of metadata about a file, allowing you to categorise and organise files differently depending on how you’re feeling or how you want to find your data.

I do have big overarching plans for this system, but I don’t think I’ll be able to implement all of them in the limited time we have been given. More on these later.

I think that, to make this fit into the time available, it will have to have the following features:

• Based on ext3, so I don’t have to worry about file allocation, etc.
• No support for multiple dbfs mounts on the same machine
• No support for network access of dbfs, unless it occurs naturally
• No support for operating systems other than Linux, but the code should be written with portability in mind

I will be keeping this blog updated as I work on the project, partly for my own reference, but also for anyone who might find this interesting.