I’m looking for an already working solution to build some sort of filesystem on DB and a web application as file manager. Actually it doesn’t seem hard, written on paper. I’m talking about a small set of tables to store a typical filesystem structure -file, folder, ownership and so on- and a web frontend for user interaction. I’d like it to eventually have sign on, to handle privileges on resources and access concurrency.
My preferred platform would be Asp.net and Sql Server.
Does anyone know about something already available on web? like an open source package? a commercial product? even just a live working scenario on the internet?
I must confess I’m curious why you would want this. If need a filesystem, use the filesystem? If you need it remotely, set up an FTP-site? It’s fast, easy and secure with freeware products like FileZilla Server.
But to your answer. The main difficulty I see here is hierarchical data. The main advantage of a relational database is well.. relations. And you don’t really need that for this. Therefore I would consider a document database for this. RavenDB would probably be a good fit for you since I believe it explicitly has blob-storage capabilities. Its advantage is that it supports hierarchical data out of the box.
Since it’s json based it is also a good fit for a web-api and won’t require you to use a heavyweight ORM with an Entity model etc etc.