I am doing some development in PHP and MySQL at the moment and was getting frustrated dealing with SQL. There isn't anything inherently wrong with SQL, it's just that I don't know it as well as I should. I wanted to make a backup copy of a table and had to look up the SQL syntax to do it, this was easy to do and it worked, but last night while my mind was coming down from its caffeine induced high I thought: "Wouldn't it be nice to be able to treat the database as a filesystem and use commands like mv, cp, rm, grep."

I then came up with an entire plan for how the directory structure could work, what projects I could look at to learn how to implement a filesystem (gmailfs, FUSE) etc. The last thought I had before 3am was: "I bet someone has done this already," and, they have.

Check out SQLFS (sourceforge page) and LinFS. Both seem quite alpha and I can't even find the download for SQLFS. Has anyone else used one of these or a variant? What were your experiences?