/dev/disk and /dev/input both have a bunch of view subdirectories on my Debian box. the idea of a symlink itself suggests denormalization, suggests views, suggests relations, so perhaps we should try to loosen up our mental model of what a file-system is some?

i upvoted because it's an interesting question, but to me i would like good patterns for how to express data & views on the file-system. data goes into databases to die, alas. it remains tragically single consumer, one database one application. not that it has to be, but that's how things usually are. the file system by contrast is exposed system wide, & requires no app configuration or discovery to consume data on it (I guess choosing a file might sort of count?). there are a wide range of command line and gui tools built in to the os for exploring & manipulating the file system.

perhaps we could make a good sql on the file-system plugin, to make sql data more accessible across the system? :)