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CNet on WinFS

Posted by michael on from the ronco-vegematic dept.

Weston writes "CNet has posted an article about WinFS, or more specifically, what Bob Muglia (a VP at Microsoft) said about it in a recent interview. According to Muglia, the new filesystem will not replace NTFS, but will incorporate feratures of NTFS, SQL, and XML all into a filesystem which, accoring to Microsoft, will open up a whole new world of information availability. He goes on to describe such a filesystem as the 'holy grail' that is sought by developers. WinFS is slated for release in 2005/06 as part of the Longhorn OS."

4 of 466 comments (clear)

  1. Thoughts on XML by I8TheWorm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I use XML quite a bit in my data-based programs. But I've seen it used WAY too often and in applications where XML just doesn't make any sense (like parsing 1GB files, for instance). XML is a nice tool, but isn't the fastest way to get to data.

    That being said, does anyone else think using XML in a filesystem is a horrible way to go? Especially given the hard drive capacity we're seeing today... number of files that can be stored, folders/subfolders, etc...

    Unless I misread the article, I just don't see this being a smart move.

    --
    Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
    1. Re:Thoughts on XML by ajs · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is not a new concept, and it does work out ok.

      Your basic linear span of bytes file type becomes a subset of all possible data-structures. Structured file filesystems with various semantics have been around since the 70s (perhaps earlier). XML gives you a way that everyone can agree on to store the schema (of course you'd use a binary XML representation on disk, and have a few prefab schemas (like the DBM type key-value pair) hard-coded into libraries for speed).

      This is a good idea, and perhaps one of the few places that I've heard people talk about using XML at a low level that I would agree with in princable.

      Of course Microsoft will get it wrong. Because they're idiots? Not at all, there are a lot of bright people there, but Microsoft's priorities are set by their largest customers and for those customers and for marketing reasons, they make some truly AWFUL descisions, like consolodating the Win32 API and throwing away the multi-tiered, user-space service approach that NT was originally supposed to have on top of HAL and the NT microkernel. That was done because MS saw a need to give their largest base of developers (corporate in-house mostly) as close to a seemless transition from Win3.1 as possible, and for no real technical reason that had to do with NT.

      That ruined what was likely to to have been one of the coolest pieces of software that Microsoft would have ever produced. NT (now the heart of XP and Longhorn) is still a cool OS at its core, but as I expect to happen with this filesystem, it was so hobbled by the needs of their business customers that it took a decade to extract any real value from that.

      I'm not MS-bashing. I'm a Linux/UNIX/BSD user, but I'm willing to accept that good developers work on all sorts of software, open and proprietary. The problem is that the larger a software business is, the less voice the developers have.

      Personally, I'm waiting to see where Reiser goes...

  2. Re:What about those of us by MasonMcD · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you've seen OS X Panther's new search capabilities, you'll know how fast things can be: live recursive searching. It's pretty sweet. Works in the finder, as well as Preview for PDFs.

  3. Re:Been saying it for years by penguin7of9 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Filesystems are just inefficient, shitty databases.

    The fact that file systems are databases has been recognized since, oh, databases were invented. One of the first things IBM tried after inventing the relational database was to replace the file system with it. You can tell how far that went.

    The choice to make the UNIX file system the kind of database that it is was deliberate. UNIX file systems are a highly efficient and robust database, with proven metadata, security, and data consistency models. They do almost exactly what people want databases to do with their unstructured data.

    For anything else, they use other databases. By a stroke of genius (or maybe just historical inevitability), those more specialized databases can be stored and accessed inside the file system database.

    A database file system is quite accurately described as "The Holy Grail": it's an ancient mythological object of no practical value, something that only insane people would pursue.