alt Hacker News> I realized something that bugged me. ELF is already a database.
Even more broadly applied: Every base of data is already a database (that's what the compound word means). Programs like sqlite and postgres used to be called by the more precise term "Relational Data Base Management Software" or "RDBMS" until their use became so widespread that they were colloquially called databases instead.
The very first data base structures were more like, each geometric sector of a hard drive is a record, and each head is a column. This was a straightforward translation of punch-card workflow onto a magnetic disk.
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I understand what you are saying, but that's not close to the original meaning of the term, or at least not what I have seen in early papers. Originally the idea was a single central repository of information which would be used to run a company: so similar to systems like SAP, but obviously a lot simpler and with the assumption of running on a mainframe. It didn't refer to a particular choice of data structure, but to the way that multiple business processes would share information.
Like the Unicode Character Database, which is a series of text files in similar-seeming but disparate formats (it now also has an XML representation):
yes you are right, in the article the author thinks he just realized something special "elf is a data base", but no, is not, its just a structured piece of data "a database", sqlite file format is also that, the only diference between Elf and sqlite file is that the latter has a a better "client" to inspect it.