Preben Mikael Bohn wrote:
I need it for making a database of all my files (~100000) with some additional information in it (such as e.g. timetags, backup time, etc). Of course I could just use a copy of the file-system to another directory, but this is to slow (too many system-calls every time you need to create a file, etc) and it takes up too much space (I only need <20 bytes of data per file).
So the two main requirements to it is that is should be fast to look up files, and it shouldn't take up too much space.
I was thinking about maybe making a small FAT-look-alike-system...
Since this looks like some serious amount of data, you might want to think about using, e.g., a SQL database such as MySQL (that's the one I use; I can't compare it with other databases, but it works well for me). Besides doing the data management efficiently, it will also allow for complex query operations. (Sure, you'd have to learn SQL syntax if you don't know it already, but it's not that complicated.)
Eike Lange wrote a MySQL unit, I wrote a Database unit which uses MySQL and provides access to the most common operations with a slightly more comfortable (at least to me ;-) interface. You can find them in our respective contrib directories.
BTW, MySQL is a client/server database, so it probably won't work under plain Dos for lack of multitasking (unless you put the server on a separate box), but on Unix and Windows, it should be no problem.
Frank