Tedious to manage and update (HTML) files on the server side difficult to keep pages of data updated automatically --- modification usually done by a human using word processor or editing tools |
A plain UNIX file system as "database" only supports primitive functions such as open,read/write and close |
More powerful operations on files are required for an information system which are supposed to provide information instead of raw data. |
e.g. need: low-level data manipulation operators such as those provided in RDBMS: select, insert, update, commit, rollback,etc |
Meaningful information needs to be generated on-the-fly from raw data |