[gdp]

It seems rather generous to call this a database. It's files on a filesystem. The lack of any kind of transactional consistency guarantees (Dropbox is notoriously awful at this), and the lack of any sane mechanism for querying this "database" means that it's just "data", not a "database".

[mistercow]

Transactions are not a requirement for databases, and querying is the domain of the DBMS, not the database itself.

[gdp]

You're quite right. I think my complaint was that it reduces the definition of "database" to "anything that is used to store data", rather than the database being the json file(s) themselves, at which point we have degenerated to about the same terminological point where it would be reasonable to call saving CSV or MS-Access files into a Dropbox folder "Dropbox-as-a-Database", which seems an unhelpful label, if nothing else.

[yefrederic]

I think he calls it "database" because it is strongly integrated with the database syntax of the Opa language. You can declare and use this "dropbox-database" just like a Mongo one, independently of the notion of safe-ness of the database.

[gdp]

Consistent with the complaint leveled against my previous comment, I should think that this is really consistent with the DBMS syntax of the Opa language</pedantry>