'Storage' to Replace Traditional Filesystems?

JigSaw writes "OSNews is reporting on Storage, an innovative project which aims to replace the traditional hierarchical filesystems with a new document store which is database-based (PostgreSQL). The current implementation, built under Gnome 2.x for now, offers natural language access, network transparency, and a number of other features. The project is currently in alpha (screenshots already available), and it is part of the next major generation of Gnome. It is currently developed by Seth Nickell, the person responsible for the enhanced Gnome usability on 2.x and its HIG, among other things."

Comments

How does the metadata get into the database?

[farnz]

My major concern with all these database type filesystems is that the gains are always shown as things like, "Find all films directed by Steven Spielberg", and yet this is not information that the computer can necessarily gather for itself.

Outside of a work environment, I've rarely encounter anyone who keeps consistent, useful filenames, let alone metadata indexes; it seems to me that people will skimp on the metadata, and thus limit the usefulness to metadata that the computer can collect automatically ("All movies that last under 90 minutes"). It's like CD collections, or books; libraries have nicely catalogued and ordered collections. Private individuals don't; they have roughly ordered collections on the shelf, and don't bother keeping them in any better order. I suspect the same will happen with these metadata systems; people won't do the work needed to make them truely useful.

Re:Obvious advantages

[dabadab]

"Integrated mime-types. No more relying on file extensions and other hacks. The mime-type (and subsequent viewer) is right there in the query"

And how does that meta data gets to the db? Oh, right, it will rely on file extensions and other hacks :)

Re:Windows?

[Zocalo]

Not quite, NTFS is a traditional file table with some bells and whistles, but it's not a "database" in the sense meant here(1). The next version of Windows, "Longhorn", is supposed to introduce a new file system called WinFS that will use a version of SQLServer as its backend. Whether they will actually deliver or not is another matter, since we were promised this in 1995 with Cairo and Taligent (remember them?), and now that Longhorn appears to have been pushed back...

There are also issues with gaining acceptance for the change in the way things work. This kind of thing has not really been done on a large scale in the wild before, on any OS, so whether people will be willing to accept the security and reliablity issues that may ensue is another matter. For example, what are the implications of a compromise in the database engine? MS is planning on using SQL, so if things go awry and it becomes possible to maliciously inject raw SQL to the filesystem interface... Oops. On the otherhand, the benefits for data retrival are *huge*. Imagine being able to find any audio files on your entire system by Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears and delete them all in one go by searching on the tag fields! ;)

(1) Technically, all filesystems are databases, it's just that current ones are a collection of flatfile database tables that can point to each other, generally in a heirarchial manner. When people say "database" in the same sentence as "filesystem" they usually mean "relational database". As an aside however, high end databases usually forgo the need for a file system and provide the ability to write their tables directly to disk on a dedicated partition.

"Damn, I left that on my roommate's desk"

[kfg]

"Well, where do you go?"

"Stanford."

"No problemo, I'm heading that way later and I can grab it for you. What's your room?"

"Dorm 5, Room 109. It's the desk on the left."

( We didn't bother to state earth.us because we were already inside those directories)

Yes, yes we do think heirarchically. Most of the history of human thought has been fitting everything we can lay our filthy little brain cells on into heirarcheis, whether they wish to fit into them or not. It's intuitive.

As for natural language didn't we learn about that with COBOL? Natural language only speeds the learning process slightly ( the majority of the learning still lying in the realm of understanding the basic concepts involved), but then becomes a pain in the ass forever afterward.

Looking at the screenshots it's also ugly as all sin. The physicist in me can't help but feel that a model that ugly can't possibly be correct.

I think this makes just about as much sense as using a document preperation language (XML) as the basis of a database.

Which is to say, none.

KFG