Re: generic modelling of data models; enforcing constraints dynamically...

Sam Mason wrote:
> It all depends on the problem domain of course, but this seems to work
> OK for us! I really want to hack Samba around so that the users can
> view the files directly from inside the database, but I'm not sure how
> good an idea this really.

"hack Samba"? Wouldn't it be easier to use one of the database-as-a
filesystem FUSE bindings and run stock samba over that?

The perl Fuse::DBI module's example sounds pretty similar to the
system you described where he "file" seems to be a column in a table.
http://www.rot13.org/~dpavlin/fuse_dbi.html

If that doesn't suit your needs there are more elaborate ones(libferris)
that seem more complex and more flexible, and simpler ones (dumbofs) that
seem to be meant more as example code you could hack for your purposes
http://lwn.net/Articles/306860/
http://yiannnos.com/dumbofs

And then you could use unmodified samba out-of-the-box exporting
that to whatever the heck speaks SMB/CIFS these days.