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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."
I think Longhorn will be the first Windows with a database filesystem. It will probably be based on SQL Server
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.
SELECT * FROM MY_FILES
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...
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.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
No, because doing away with the root filesystem, user stuff in /home, config files in /etc, and so forth would break a number of Unix standards Linux's big advantage of being able to run many Unix apps (if you compile from source) would disappear.
Storage will apparently be an interface to the existing real filesystem. Joe User won't know the difference.
GPG Key ID: 8C444E97 Fingerprint: E7BA D851 9714 8D97 C4F9 1777 8168 6913 8C44 4E97
What then happens to SQL as a MS product? If its built in to every OS, why then would anyone buy it.
Remember how Windows XP Home and Pro editions can serve files only to less than a dozen simultaneous clients? This is to boost sales of the IIS bundled with Windows 2000 Server and now Windows Server 2003. Microsoft SQL Server Home Edition will probably be limited.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The filesystem on AS400 is actually a db2 database and it work quite well
"What this world needs is a really big injection of orginal thought"
They are original ideas, they just don't make it into the PC world where MS dominates. MS come up with as many original ideas as McDonalds
and since all KDE & Gnome (and frankly most open source projects) are doing is playing catchup with MS then originality is never going to be
a prime concern.
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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
"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
Am I the only one that isn't totally into the idea of "googling" data on my hard drive?
Granted, it's mostly pr0n on there, so it's almost the same thing, but still...
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
SELECT * FROM videos WHERE name LIKE '%porn%'
Having SQL Server as the underlying filesystem technology doesn't mean that you're going to be running SQL Server directly. I mean, if you currently use NTFS, there isn't a NTFS daemon that the kernel connects to when it does filesystem transactions. Just like every other filesystem, the support will be built into the kernel. Instead of writing data as NTFS does, the structure will look a lot more like how SQL Server stores data -- with built in indexes, etc.
Many database servers already have some fairly optimized code when it comes to file access. This just implements it at the kernel level, rather than having it sit on top of a traditional fs.
Actually, Be had two flavors of "filesystem as database" in widespread deployment. OK, not as widespread as Windows, but certainly thousands of users. The first version of Be's filesystem, by Benoit Schillings, was very database like, but performance was so-so. The second version of BeFS, by Dominic Giampaolo, was less general in implementation, but had the same metadata-driven capabilities. There's an interesting article on this at http://www.theregus.com/content/4/24485.html. Basically, Be did everything that this project is talking about, years ago. That's not to take anything away from the project -- it's cool if more mainstream operating systems catch up to the innovations of niche players, because more people benefit. Dominic is working at Apple, so there's hope that MacOS X's filesystem will start incorporating the rich-metadata, dynamic view model of the world. And while MS has (I think) pushed the "filesystem as database" out of the next version of Windows NT/XP/whatever, it's still planned for the next version after that, so perhaps in a deade or so we'll all be able to do what Be did back in '91. And of course, Palm owns the Be code, so perhaps PalmOS will lead the way?
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
It was called IFS and Oracle did it like, almost four years ago.
Versioning and various other metadata existed. It could be exported via SMB, NFS, FTP, and as a regular "local" windows filesystem.
And, why is this such a great big deal? I don't see the same stink raised as the possibility of Longhorn having a DB for a filesystem.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
I disagree, strongly. Files are an artifact of a bunch of bad implementation decisions when stripping Multics down to produce UNIX. What programmers want to be able to do is manipulate data structures and store them persistently. What files force you to do is waste tons of time writing code to take your data structures and write them out as sequences of bytes and read them back in.
One OS that solved this nicely was NewtonOS. If you wanted to manipulate persistently stored data you opened a "soup" that contained objects. So if you wanted to, say, set up an appointment with someone for lunch, you could find the person in the address book "soup" and then create an entry in the databook "soup" recording the appointment, which would immediately appear in all other apps that dealt with appointments (because app's accessed the same data structures, and were notified of changes so that they could update). So your data was not trapped in a particular application's proprietary format, and users weren't forced to learn the artificial concept of a "file" but instead could think about "my appointments" or "my address book".
If you haven't tried it, don't knock it. As a developer, and as a user, it was wonderful -- much more straightforward than "files" and "directories".
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Their feature list say it will work with Oracle and other SQL99 compliant databases, so I would assume it isn't linked against libpq directly.
Rod Taylor
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.It won't improve performance if you know exactly what you are looking for. The goal is to improve performance when you only have a vague idea of what you want.
This isn't a place to store config files or cronned shell scripts which have definitive locations and content.
This is a replacement for that 5TB corporate filestore with a 50 directory hierarchy that nobody can figure out, and a content based find takes days to complete.
Rod Taylor
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
> SQL is slow compared to things like BerkeleyDB
:) But modern RDBMSes have integrity control facilities as well.
BerkeleyDB is a hierarchial database. SQL is godzillion times faster on complex searches.
> Your database becomes corrupt, you lose everything.
Your filesystem becomes corrupt, you lose everything.
And yeah, I know about journaling, so don't bother
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
http://theregister.com/content/4/30670.html
"The oft-misunderstood Windows Future Storage (WinFS), which will include technology from the "Yukon" release of SQL Server, is not a file system," reports Thurrot. "Instead, WinFS is a service that runs on top of - and requires - NTFS."
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.
Um, artificial as they may be, these so called "files" have been around for some time, in fact long before computers. Users can quite intuitively understand the concepts of "file" and "folder." I really think you are trying to make the difference seem greater than it actually is. (on the user side, that is)
sic transit gloria mundi
www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html describes why the relational model is not the right one for large heterogeneous stores (filesystems), and describes the approach ReiserFS (a Linux filesystem used mostly in Europe) is taking instead.
Hans
"Files" are not a bad idea. It is nice to have an interface of commands that is limited in size and easily serialized (ie open/read/write/seek). If Unix had instead mmap'd files in it's original design there would probably not be transparent access to network file systems or many of the other things we take for granted today. So the design of files was actually a huge win.
1. The primary problem is implementation. Filesystems today are designed to store small numbers of very large files (ie more than 1K in size). Anybody who wants to store "objects" that are smaller than about 1K in size (like if you are implementing a "registry", for instance) is forced to write or use a database program, with needless complexity, to force all this data into a single file, so that it can be stored efficiently. What we need is a design where tiny files (like 4 bytes) can be stored efficiently.
Supposedly ReiserFS addresses this, but it is not clear if it does the necessary level of compression: ideally if you had 100 files with the same 50-bytes name and 1 byte stored in them, all those names would be in the same 50 bytes on the disk.
Sadly NOBODY seems to be trying this, and keep spouting "attributes" and "registry" and "config file". Those are all work-arounds for poor file systems.
All files must have the capability of being a "folder" and having subfiles. Any time anybody says "attributes" this should mean this sort of subfile.
2. The other problem is the blinders so people believe the "filename" is some sort of user-friendly data. This leads to brain-dead ideas like "case independence" and "wide characters" and the fact that certain bytes like "/" and zero are disallowed. This requires programs to cook data in strange ways to use it as indexes into the filesystem. This used to be true of the *data* in old systems, and we know now how horrid that was (only a rudimentary piece of that old stupidity remains in Windows text/binary distinction but I hope newer Windows systems will move that out of the kernel).
The filesystem should identify files with a counted length of bytes, just like the data in the file. In fact "name" should be a subfile of any file, and you rename it by writing a new "name". I don't think this can be solved without fixing existing filesystems.
(for "user friendly" names some form of quoting is going to be necessary. Since Windows has made "\" useless I would use that for quoting. "\0" is a null, "\\" is a backslash, "\/" is a forward slash. Just "/" itself indicates a break between hierarchy levels. For semi-Windows compatability you can also make just "\" followed by an unassigned code also mean a break between hierarchy levels.
3. The other thing that is needed (but could be done atop existing implementations) is to change the model of files. They should be "atomic" in that when you open a file for writing, you get an empty file, and this is invisible to any other program. The file only appears at the moment you close it, and only to programs that then open it for reading (programs with the same name already open continue to see the old file). Current files where you can replace a block in the middle are a special case that only a few programs use, and support can be operating-system dependent (and while you are at it, try making it so you can insert or delete data and not just overwrite).
4. As for "database" this can all be done with symbolic links (which can be implemented atop any file system which efficiently stores identical small blocks of data).
Of course, databases are very useful for organizing user data. People already keep PIM info, images, and lots of other stuff in databases. Lotus Notes is built entirely on databases.
But "replacing the traditional file system" carries with it the notion of ripping ext3 out of the kernel and putting a relational database there. That's a very bad idea. Databases don't belong into the kernel. They are far too inefficient to handle most storage needs, they are far too complex to go into the kernel, and they just don't need to be in the kernel. Operating system kernels need simple, fast storage systems. Something like ext3. ReiserFS is pushing the limits. PostgreSQL would be going too far.
As an aside, this is an idea that just about every nerd has when they learn about databases and retrieval. It's been tried various times since the 1960's. There are probably good reasons why interfaces don't use them. Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that the vast majority of files on your system are not user files, they are bits and pieces of the operating system. And for the files that actually are used by users (mail, PIM info, images, text, etc.), they usually already have special-purpose database interfaces available to them as part of the applications that users use to access them.
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.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I suppose it is probably too late to inject comments and have them moderated to the point of visibility as the madness has largely subsided... but here's to futile acts ;-) I was not really intending Storage to make a big splash right now, I wanted to keep it low-key, but I guess the damage is done so I might as well comment. I'm sorry that I didn't have time to put up a more technically-oriented exposition of Storage. *shrug*
Some technical notes... that site is sparse on technical information so I'll fill in some for the curious.