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'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."
it's better for programs to abstract data like that, the fs should only to provide access to the medium, nothing else.
It's really a sad that there was a perfectly good implementation of database file system, but the company wasn't able to topple a monopoly and got squashed. MS really should have just bought BeOS and ported everything over to it. They could have just called it LongHorn and released it this year instead of waiting until 2006.
Hopefully they plan on extending this to the networked environment, allowing multiple domain/realm file permissions, authentication, and encryption.
Anything to replace NIS and its bastard stepchildren.
Yes, from what I have read, that is true. MS plans to use SQL server 2k3 as the underlying technology for the file system for longhorn. What I just dont get though... if SQL is going to be used as the file system... then every Longhorn PC in a sense either needs to have SQL ( or MSDE ) or needs access to a SQL server which seems unlikely as you would bottleneck on the network speed.
What then happens to SQL as a MS product? If its built in to every OS, why then would anyone buy it. Ive seen MS build other peoples apps into their products, but never seen them do it to their own. Are they actually going to kill off a profit centre?
Of course it's only wishful thinking. I'd be nervous to see exactly how this integrates into other "Legacy" applications. I can also see be performance penalties since you are now querying a database, rather than looking at a simple file structure...
I don't know how a database system can improve a file system's performance, especially with the unnecessary overhead associated with, the current state of the ext3 file system is doing quite well, and updatedb/locate works fine for me.
What can really interest me is something like updatedb/locate but with SQL syntax support, this could be awesome.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
To my understanding, the delay in Longhorn's release is a result of the TrustWorthy computing initive...
This, IMHO, is a good thing. The big difference between MS and Open Source on something like this... in Open Source land, you can often see progress from day one... no matter how unstable it is. With MS, you wont see anything until the whole product is done... Not saying one is better then the other, but...
Who owns the patent on this type of filesystem implementation - there must be one? Microsoft, IBM, Seth...SCO?
Not true.
This isn't a replacement filesystem, just a document-storage system - you won't be able to access your documents easily from a shell.
It is a good starting point though, once working, the next step would be to compile it into the kernel, so that you can create Storage partitions, etc. and be able to do something like:
cd music by U2Now that would be cool
The idea was probably stolen from Xerox Parc in the first place, of course.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
ah, reiserfs... i use it for everything. i would totally have to agree with you on that.
from what i hear though, database driven file systems are quite slow... can someone clarify that for me?
Everyone is everyon is looking at this from the Geek perspective. I teach computer technology to absolute beginners and the file system is the MOST confusing aspect. Most people have trouble with it and some people will never get it. If a database driven file system had a very simple interface (i.e. text searching that had fuzzy logic so that misspellings were okay) it would be GREAT for 90% of the population.
1995 Signs to Cairo
1996 Unearthing Cairo
The so call Longhorn WinFS directory is just another rencarnation of the Cairo object orientated file system.September 1, 2003 Eweek 'Longhorn' Rollout Slips
Microsoft have been attempting this type of functionality since 1991, over a decade. Meanwhile, one open source GNOME developer, with help from the other core GNOME developers, provides most of the features within months.People don't seem to see how great this is. Maybe it's because most people don't have all that much data.
On my home systems, I have over 250GB online. That doesn't even count my music or videos/movies, which I keep on seperate, removable, optical storage.
I can tell you from experience, that managing that much data is a huge hassle. Let's say you've got your files organized well. You probably have hundreds of folders for each subject, and you have to broswe to each one with each new file you save. I have a folder (several actually, for various subjects) where I save thing that I've haven't taken a look at yet. Let's say it's a program that I haven't installed. Well once I do install it, I need to clean up all the temporary files, then browse around to another folder (takes a minute or two when you have hundreds of folders), where I save installed programs, and browse to the appropriate sub-folder, and save it. But then I end up doing the same thing with a video clip... Watching it, deciding to delete or save it, then browsing to a sub-sub-sub-sub folder to move it.
Of course, that's enough of a hassle, but things get complicated when I want to move things to another systems, which obviously isn't going to have the same filesystem. Merging each individual folder, into each different folder is seriously time-consuming, and teedious. Without fail, there always ends up being a couple folders in the wrong place, because they were a sub-folder of something else, that I did happen to see when I coppied the contents of the folder.
Then matters are even further complicated, because I may choose to delete older content months later or so, and locating everything is a huge mess.
Personally, I would like to save everything in one place, not having to change folder to folder for each file. When saving something, I could just enter a handful of keywords (eg. "picture penguin snow") which would be much less work than moving to directories or even typing in a long filename. From there, a simple database system would be be able to know what type of file it is, how large it is, and how old it is. That would make it incredibly easy to manage. Whenever I want a file, I type-in "images older than 1 years" or "programs marked as archived" and I get EVERYTHING I'm looking for in a fraction of the time. Not only that, but it makes pruning out old data as easy as it could possibly be. Just search for "linux" and delete older version, no worries about what folder it's in... If it's in a temporary folder and you haven't used it yet, or if it's archived and been in-use on your system forever. Obviously you'll be able to see that information, but unlike in our current systems, it won't stand in your way when you want to find things.
It's absoultely no work at all to transfer files, since the info should stay with them, and it will automatically integrate perfectly with your local file management/organization scheme. What's more, data like marking something as "archived" is great in that your system could automatically move it over the network where you archive your files. Since your filesystem would be a smart database, when you search for the file, it could still turn up in the search results, and be automatically moved back where you need it, when you need it.
Personally, I think this would not only save time and effort, but money as well, because so many people wouldn't be dealing with their file problems by just throwing more space in their systems, instead of spending time on figuring out where every file is, what they can get rid of, dupilcate files, and junk like that.
With this, I should be able to say "tar -xjf 'newest version of mplayer'" However, this will need to be in the actual filesystem to be useful, not just supported for GNOME applications.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I think the examples he shows are pretty good. In my mp3 collection, I would like to see "All bluegrass songs" or "all remixes of Parliament Funkadelic stuff". How do you propose to do this in a hierarchical filesystem? Most of my bluegrass artists are under 'bluegrass', but then there are some bluegrass songs that were in non-bluegrass artists and albums folders.
In my workplace we are having the same problems. On our shared folders, we have shipping documents in each clients' folder. But then, what if we what to see all shipping documents from a particular vendor? Currently, we would have to go into each customers' folder (which are also broken down by year archives) and grab all documents which *might* be from said supplier, and then open each one, and look to see, because the supplier name isn't in the filename. It's horribly broken, which is why we are moving to a database storage system for such documents.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
> BerkeleyDB is a hierarchial database. SQL is
> godzillion times faster on complex searches.
Great, but who is going to often do complex enough searches for files that makes any sort of RDBMS worthwhile? The vast majority of searches would be simple keyed terms.
Although this is an interesting idea, an all-relationsl filesystem would prove to be a usability nightmare.
The relational zealots are quick to point out that a relational system can model any sort of data. Indeed, it can do this. This does not, however, mean that it's always good at doing this. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, and sometimes it's not. In this case, it is very much not a good tool for sole access to files on the system (though it can make an excellent tool for complementary methods of access).
The reason that hierarchical filesystems have survived for so long is due to one thing: navigability. It's relatively easy for any user to browse what's on the system and get a good idea of how it is organized.
You can't navigate a relational system, which will prove to be the downfall of any all-relational system which comes into being. You can, of course, do a SELECT * FROM volume if you really want to, but that does exactly that: it gives you all the data, with no particular organization. Examining the entire "sea of data" suddenly becomes cumbersome in the extreme. So while User A might be able to set up an all-relational filesystem completely according to his own tastes, User B will be totally lost on that same system. This is, to say the least, a nightmare for anyone working in a shared environment.
This is not to say that the relational model isn't necessarily a useful thing for filesystems. On the contrary, it can be very useful for certain kinds of searches. As time goes on, I believe we'll see more relational-style searching technology incorporated into file managers and search tools. However, there also needs to be a means of hierarchical navigation. Humans tend to think of things in terms of locus, and a means of providing that kind of reference point have to be maintained.
Luckily, this can actually still be emulated using relational-style tables, even though it's somewhat less efficient than classical storage techniques. Some filesystems already do something similar to this, and the results are promising. Look at Be's filesystem for an example of that.
The best way to go, moving forward, is something not unlike what BeOS did, with both hierarchical and relational methods of examining data. This allowed for the best of both worlds. The default method of getting at data is still the hierarchical paradigm, but relational searches can be applied to create what some have called "smart folders" (perhaps "boxes" might be a better term?) Systems like this "Storage" should be focusing on complementing traditional systems in this way, rather than replacing them.
Just wait till you see the way "Pivots" work in the new Longhorn shell. The canonical example is sorting thousands of mp3s by artist, but it'll be A-FUCKIN-MAZIN.
Face it: databases rock. You never know how many interesting questions you didn't ask because you couldn't think in sets until you do it, and then it's FAST as all get out.
> How often does the average user do that?
> Like never?
No, like, when he suspects his system is infected with trojan or worm and he wants to get the list of executable files installed in last five days.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
No, this isn't what is needed. Hierarchical object-oriented persistent object trees is what is needed.
Let me explain.
Information in real life is organized in trees. It is obvious anywhere one can look. From the organizational chart of a company to the chair that you are sitting on, everything is a tree; a tree of information, where each little piece of information consists of other pieces of information.
If you check computer applications, almost all application contains some sort of tree. Take a Word document, for example: the master document, the contents, the heading 1 and subheading paragraphs, the pictures, the drawings. Everything is a tree, and the document can be browsed as a tree.
Take your favorite mail client. Information is organized in a tree: inbox, outbox, sent, trash; each of these contain an e-mail. An e-mail itself is composed of subject, body, attachments. The body consists of paragraphs; the attachment consists of files.
Take your favorite drawing program: the picture consists of layers; each layer consists of shapes; each shape may consist of other shapes.
Take your favorite 3d/cad program: a 3d object consists of other 3d objects.
Take the gui: a window consists of other windows.
Relational databases don't provide tree organization. I don't want a freaking flat table to store my documents. I want to organize them in trees. That's why a filesystem has subdirectories.
The biggest problem of the current filesystem technology, is that a 'file' is as dumb as it gets: it is just a collection of bytes, waiting to be manipulated by some other program. It is even untyped, for God's shake!!! one program may view it as a series of bytes, another program may view it as text, another program may view it as code!!! The file itself can't tell you anything about its properties, about its contents, about the way it is supposed to function....
If a file could tell the outside world how to be operated, then the world would be a much better place. If a file could tell me its properties, if it provided me with the tools to manipulate it, then I would make any type of app that processes the file as needed.
The above is essentially object orientation on the filesystem level. RDBMS don't offer such kind of functionality!!! at best, an RDMBS offers an index on a key for quick searching, and that's it!!! There is no notion of tree, nor each file exposes its properties/methods/functionality to its users!!!
So I say a big 'NO' to relational filesystems.We can immediately move to the upper level:
1) each node of information is AN OBJECT.
2) the object specification is defined at the filesystem level. Much like COM or .NET or CORBA.
3) each object can contain other objects, if it inherits and implements a specific interface.
4) each object is PERSISTENT. The filesystem takes care of persistence, according to attributes of the object's fields. Complex objects that are composed of other objects are also managed in the same way.
5) the parent object provides the storage implementation. The storage implementation would be object-oriented!!! An object could implement an RDBMS-like storage capability with indexes, keys, etc.
At each given time, the information model inside the computer could be:
1) splitted in multiple computers.
2) shared by multiple users.
3) checked for security in ONE place, inside the operating system.
4) provided as a framework to programming languages.
5) replicated across sites with minimum of code
6) a unified GUI could handle it
7) searching through it will become a breeze!!! (for example show me all MP3 with artist = Elvis and title = rock)
After all, 90% of the programming goes to load/store and display information. It is silly not to provide a unified mechanism for that. And a simple SQL-based RDBMS does not cut it.
You mean gnome steals an idea that MS has been working on for years (And never brought out because NOBODY wanted it)
:(
Sounds pretty typically O.S. to me. Someone ELSE innovates, decides the time isn't right. O.S. steals the idea, comes out with it anyway, claims innovation.
If I'm to have a natural language interface to find my files, I'd really like to make spoken requests instead of typing a long sentence. Do they have plans for that in GNome?
If it allowed natural language interaction with the machine, people might just provide more information. Since it begs for a voice interface, why not have the machine ask a few questions about a document while you're editing/viewing it? When a new file comes in via email with no metadata, the machine says "what's this all about?". You'll naturally describe it using words similar to those you'll use to retreive it later. Sounds fantastic if all this can really be made to work.
Where does this metadata come from? I assume I have to enter it myself. This means the more files I have, the more detailed and specific my data entry becomes. And that much more tedious.
Even worse is the uncertainty that would arise. Is my search for "horn solos" not returning results because there are no such files, or because the filesystem does not have meta data describing the files I want as such?
At this point, hierarchial organization once again becomes much more appealing again.
1. I know precisely where one more more files are located and I want to see their contents as fast as possible. I want to move around 100s of such files easily from directory to directory at the potentially optimal speed of the disk subsystem. I might also want to do batch edits or renames of these files. Speed is the only truly important characteristic.
2. I vaguely have an idea of what type of file I am looking for. I want to find one or more files satisfying a particular metadata (or full text) criteria and manipulate one or more such files. I want all versions of my files to be maintained and there to be full auditing of interactions with these files.
Many times 1. and 2. are mutually incompatible. The typical way these days to address having both is to have an automatic spider that maintains an indexed view of the files and the file's metadata and hope that the spider is not too far behind the actual changes being made to the contents of the files or the locations of the files. If you want to have a transactionally guaranteed implementation of 2., then you have pretty much eliminated batch manipulation of files as a reasonably performing option. Database tracked file systems do not do well when you unzip a large collection of files and then start batch copying those files to different locations.
Now, I know almost nothing about the current implementation of the new "database" file system being discussed. But, I would very much want to allow a user to designate which directories or file types would be put into relational tables and which ones would not. I might also want to be able to choose whether the relational tables were interacted with using a transactional guarantee or whether a "spider" was used. If the end user had control over when the "heavier" management of the files occurred and how much of it should be applied, then it might have utility. Part of the user's file system would then be a document management library and other parts would be a normal file system. However, I would find creating a user interface that tried to make such a solution comprehensible to an end user somewhat of a nightmare.
This was one of those revolutionary products that never really took off for some reason. Text -based word processor , but this was pre-Windows (perhaps that was the problem).
From what I remember, you could create a document, and then save it based with keywords. It was really aimed at writers and was a great way to organize a bunch of documents, create outlines etc. Sort of like having an electronic file card system. Very very cool - the Windows Explorer is almost primitive by comparison. Could've easily extended it to support any type of file.
It's a great idea nice to see GNOME pick it up.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Also, although I agree with you regarding your filesystem to database comparison, running a rdbms engine --even if it is stripped down creates yet another abstraction layer between the user request and the hardware. I know from using SAP on high volume transactions systems that even Oracle's dbwr's (or even db_ioslaves) can get backlogged during periods of high write activity. I think I am going to take a "wait and see" approach with this type of filesystem.