This disclosure describes systems, methods, and apparatus for creating or updating a table in a fully-indexed hierarchical database for storing both structured and unstructured data, where the database structure rather than separate index files provides indexing. The database includes a hierarchy of nodes where the lowest nodes represent raw data and hard links to the raw data. Data records in a table, write request, update request, etc. can be exploded into attributes and values for those attributes, and then each value is stored in a separate file at the lowest nodes of the hierarchy.