Introducing Ghee 0.6, the latest version of the tastiest way to manage your data!

Ghee is an experiment in leveraging modern filesystem features to implement a data management system, providing a key-value database, Git-style commits, and extensive tools for manipulation of extended attributes (xattrs).

The focus of this release is the introduction of the commit-management subcommands commit, log, restore, and reset. These are modeled after their Git equivalents, but utilize Btrfs copy-on-write filesystem semantics, including read-only snapshots, to efficiently track changes.

Using Btrfs generalizes change tracking, efficiently handling not only text files, but arbitrary binary blobs as well.

It is hoped that this could lead to a version control system that handles large files in an integrated manner, whereas large file support in Git is tacked on separately – in the case of Git-LFS, requiring an additional server to implement.

When using Ghee as a database, the commit, restore, and reset commands provide transaction-like functionality, allowing modifications to be built incrementally but finalized all at once – and rolled back when mistakes are made.

The main question about what Ghee will be good for is how efficiently it can handle actual database workloads. I suspect the answer will be: not very well, based on Micheal Sproul’s experience with Butter DB, based on a similar architecture.

But for many workflows, it’s not necessary to serve large numbers of queries: Ghee would be well-suited for data scientists developing datasets and statistical models, for example.

It will be interesting to see what happens here at the meeting-place of databases, filesystems, and version control systems. Imagine adding WHERE clauses to your merge command, a la ghee merge origin annotations-20231002 -w age>45.

Now hosted at Codeberg… check it out and, as always, send bug reports my way!

Introducing Ghee 0.4, the newest release of the premier tool for manipulating Linux extended attributes! (0.3 coverage here reddit .)

This latest release adds a Rustyline-based REPL and additional tools for using the filesystem as a relational database. The new init subcommand lets you declare the primary key by which a directory (and its subdirectories) are indexed, while ins and del now allow insertion and deletion of records while keeping related indices up to date. ls is helpful in the REPL, showing Ghee’s view of the world.

In addition to direct management of extended attributes, Ghee is designed to implement a relational data model built around xattrs while offloading as much functionality as feasible to the filesystem.

As such, Ghee does nothing special to ensure the integrity of stored data. You are encouraged to layer this not on but under Ghee by your choice of filesystem. For example, ZFS, Btrfs, and Bcachefs all provide checksum-based integrity checks.

Next steps include filling in missing features in existing subcommands and using copy-on-write snapshots to provide a Git-inspired workflow, something like:

• ghee diff ./people: show how the ./people table has changed since last commit
• ghee commit ./people -m "message!": commit the ./people table in its current form with message “message!”
• ghee restore ./people gf037d2c98: restore the ./people table to its state in commit gf037d2c98
• ghee log ./people: show commit messages for all commits in the ./people table.

As I am a user of Btrfs, CoW-based features will be implemented with Btrfs in mind first. If this proves successful it could be extended to other filesystems.

Of course, I hope it goes without saying that version 0.4 of any project should NOT be used in mission-critical contexts where the cost of data loss would be substantial.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts, questions, or suggestions!

Introducing Ghee 0.3, the newest release of the premier tool for manipulating Linux extended attributes!

Originally known as Hatter and then, regrettably, as Mattress, this tastiest of tools has been redubbed Ghee after the clarified butter popular in Indian cuisine, and as a reference to the Btrfs filesystem, which originally convinced me that much database functionality has now been subsumed by advanced filesystem features.

This new release adds SQL WHERE-style predicates to filter by, e.g. ghee get --where age >= 65 ./people, and makes get recursive by default (the old behavior is still available behind the --flat flag).

The idea is for Ghee to implement as much of a relational data model as possible using the filesystem itself as a substrate. Design principles:

1. Folders are tables
2. Files are records
3. Relative paths are primary keys
4. Extended attributes are non-primary-key columns
5. Enforce schema only when present
6. The file contents are user-controlled; only directory structure, filenames, and extended attributes are used by Ghee
7. Use of filesystem features should be preferred over implementing features directly in Ghee, e.g. locking, Btrfs subvolumes, snapshots, incremental backup

Would love to hear any comments. Apologies for the name changes—third time’s the charm, I think this one’ll stick.

Mattress is a command line tool for working with Linux extended attributes (xattrs)

Because someone else’s awesome project already occupied the hatter crate, I’ve changed the name of my project from “Hatter” to “Mattress” which, weird as it is, has the advantage of actually including “attr” as a substring.

The executable name has correspondingly changed from htr to mtr.

This version begins the introduction of simple database-like features, implemented using the filesystem and extended attributes as a substrate.

Mattress sees the world in a peculiar way: it interprets a filesystem folder as a database table with one record for each file in the folder, indexed by the “primary key” of the filename.

A nested hierarchy of directories is seen by Mattress as a database table indexed by the compound key corresponding to the nested subpath, and one “record” per file encompassed under the folder recursively.

Consider this folder ./people of personnel records:

n$ mtr get ./people/*n./people/Sandeep        user.id 2n./people/Sandeep        user.name       Sandeepn./people/Sandeep        user.state      CAn./people/Sofia  user.id 1n./people/Sofia  user.name       Sofian./people/Sofia  user.state      WAn./people/Wulfrum        user.id 0n./people/Wulfrum        user.name       Wulfrumn./people/Wulfrum        user.state      CAnn

Suppose we want to index not by the name as now, but by the id. We can do this using the new idx command.

n$ mtr idx -v -k id ./people ./people:idn./people/Sandeep -> ./people:id/2n./people/Sofia -> ./people:id/1n./people/Wulfrum -> ./people:id/0nn

The arrows show the hardlinks mapping the original ./people folder to the indexed view ./people:id.

We can also index by compound keys, such as here where we index by (state,id):

n$ mtr idx -v -k state -k id ./people ./people:state:idn./people/Sandeep -> ./people:state:id/CA/2n./people/Sofia -> ./people:state:id/WA/1n./people/Wulfrum -> ./people:state:id/CA/0nn

I have some “magic” planned to speed up the get command and ease the ergonomics (letting you reference e.g. state, which will be taken from the path rather than from the per-file xattrs.) Eventually I’d like to allow for SQL SELECT-style conditions, but that’s for another day.

(Note: this project is now known as Ghee.)

In my current, semi-stealth machine learning project, I’m experimenting with using Linux filesystem extended attributes as a sort of “poor man’s” database to store annotations in.

I’m not really sure this is turning out better than using, say, a SQLite database, but it’s been interesting to try.

In the process, I built my own command line tool for manipulating xattrs, which I’m releasing under a GPL3 license, called Hatter. It’s written in Rust since that’s what I’ve mostly been writing the past few months.

There are probably many bugs, but it’s working alright for me, so I figured I’d unleash it on the world. Just… don’t go crazy

https://git.disroot.org/joshhansen/Hatter

(NOTE: This project is now known as Ghee.)