Little question of mine....

[fsnchzjr]

Please excuse my newbie question...
I've been fooling around with module programing on 2.4.0, and I've made this
little module for a char device that printk's (darn, my kernel log's growing
real huge now!!!) anything I redirect into /dev/charmod (Hurray! I made my
first module).... I have not yet implemented any read facilities, yet....
and here's my question: What's IOCTL? What do I need it for?

Oh BTW, I have this dumb little idea (please flame me if it's stupid...)...
Here goes: I want to create a small database system (possibly using
ANSI-SQL92??) that's integrated into the kernel... I think I'd make a module
for a char device, which would be used for comm' with the database and a
module for a filesystem (which I'd have to come up with) that would hold the
database... Do any of you think such a database would be faster than other
database systems? 
Please tell me what you people think about this...

PS. a big thanks to Mr. Wolff for starting me up on file_operations...