
Ask HN: Which is more fundamental: the table or the file? - combatentropy
A page is a file, but it might have been stitched together from values in a table. The table, though, is part of a database, which stores its data ultimately as a files on disk. But those files are part of the filesystem, which is a database of inodes, links, file names, and other tabular data. It goes on. The operating system bootstraps itself while reading files, like fstab. But the data in those files looks awfully tabular. After all, fstab is short for filesystem table. What is at bottom? Which one ultimately contains the other: the table or the file?
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streetcat1
A table is a logical structure. A file is a physical structure.

However, to the OS - a file is a logical structure and the block is the
physical structure.

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accrual
I think the file is more fundamental. One must know where the file is, where
it starts and ends, and how to read it before one can parse the contents (e.g.
a table) within.

Physical > Bits > Bytes > Sectors/Blocks > File System > Files > File Content
(Tables)

One could choose any point in the abstraction and everything else would be
relative.

