There is a lot of mythology around data storage.

Essentially any database stores its data in files on disks.

Check out the "oradata" directory of any Oracle installation. You'll find the ".DBF" files that contain the table and index data.

IStore defines a straightforward and highly functional interface that addresses the fundamental requirements for file-based storage: storage allocation/reallocation and commit scopes.

If you want to, you can easily use IStore as the storage interface for a relational database implementation.

....or, more straighforwardly, you could use it as part of some proprietory application to store your own data formats.

IStore though was not designed with this in mind. It has simply evolved as a by-product of the development of the Cut The Crap persistent software. The design and development process has resulted in IStore being usable as a standalone component in it own right and it is therefore presented as such.