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WinFS' Spot on Back Burner Nothing New
osViews.com writes "Charles Arthur of Independant.co.uk has an interesting editorial which analyzes Microsoft's recently postponed 'WinFS,' the file system that Microsoft had been planning to implement in Longhorn. His editorial reminds us that this technology, previously referred to as the 'NT Object Filing System' was intended for a previous version of one of Microsoft's operating system's code named 'Cairo.' Microsoft first spoke of the 'NT Object Filing System' in 1992 and scheduled a beta release in 1996 and then a full release in 1997. But limitations cause it to continue being delayed."
Yeah, something like Tivo. Once you get it working and get used to it, you would feel like losing one hand without it.
Just my 2c
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
From what I know of WinFS, it really won't be all that important anyway. It is supposed to provide a way for all files to be treated the same by the OS (roughly) right? Thus making it easier for users to search, browse, or otherwise find these files?
Well, I don't know all of the juicy details of WinFS but I have played with the new Longhorn build. The search tool that is in the Alpha release (MSDN) is much improved over the current WinXP search. It was pretty cool, although some of it can be chalked up to eye candy. It still had a certain ease of use to it.
I doubt WinFS will ever be complete, personally. But I am sure some of the innovation and development benefits will still reach us as consumers. I know where I work, we spend time doing things the customers will never see. But they will still reap many of the benefits.
I'm working on a object file system right now, and it's really not easy.
It's a simple concept:
Store on a standard journaled b-tree (or similar) filesystem the binary data, and store in a database all sorts of meta-information about the data. Also if you want, store a reverse index of the textual info and maybe another 'index' of image features if it's an image.
Then if you want to get anything, no need to go through the filesystem's tree, you can hit the DB indexes and get info instantly.
The real problem is keeping all of this in synch, with almost flawless atomic operations. (of course it's pretty much impossible to be flawlessly atomic, but one should come as close as the current journaled filesystems are).
So if you're using 2 components, let's say, a filesystem and a SQL database, then you need to open a SQL transaction, do your inserts/updates/deletes, then do the filesystem operation, then do the SQL transaction commit. If anything fails, you can revert the SQL modifications and everything goes back to normal. But if the filesystem has problems, then you can't keep the damn DB synchronized, and at some point you'll have to resynch both.
On 100k files, no problem. On 200MM files (what I'm aiming for), you're pretty much screwed. Then you have to start thinking of a self-healing system with a constantly-running checker that must ensure that it's very resource-efficient, etc...
It's just a huge problem. Supposedly Apple is solving this by Q1 2005, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see a massive increase in filesystem corruption bugs for a while on OS X (unless the DB indexing piece is just that, an indexer that runs x times a day and isn't atomically joined to the filesystem operations).
And that's why it's taking so long. Accessing filesystems as SQL data has always been a dream of anyone who has had many files. They just never knew about it.
WinFS is the 'real' solution IMO to all things like iTunes playlist managers, and expensive Content Management Systems yadi yada.
Sure, no consumer is expected to actually use SQL statements, but that doesn't mean that user mode programs should *implement* SQL features. User mode programs should only be the 'translation' layer between the user's point and click GUI, and the OS' internal implementation of the db. Surely, anyone can see that collecting meta data from the file system, and duplicating it in usermode so that you can have search capabilities on it is wasteful.
This article wasn't news to me, I've actually been waiting for this damn WinFS since just about 1996... And by god, is it ever turning into Duke Nukem Forever, but you know what, it's such a cool feature that I still can't wait for it to come out... (figuratively speaking)
Let's put this in perspective. In '92 MS was looking at the Sybase source code and thinking about building a new filesystem around a database engine. Chicago AKA Win95 was almost out the door and it seemed reasonable to shoehorn this into Cairo (NT4). They were absolutely the dominant and fastest growing player.
I commented to a collegue in '93 (paraphrasing Robert Heinlein) that I did business with MS for the same reason I obeyed Newton's laws.
What happened around 1995? The internet became a commercial entity. Suddenly, MS needed to provide new applications (like IIS, IE, Outlook Express, an SMTP aware Exchange server, etc.) not just dork with cool OS technologies. A few years later, they are comfortable again after playing catch-up and start thinking about filesystems again, this time in "Longhorn". Again, they started talking about the capability two OS releases into the future.
However, this isn't a feature that is going to drive sales. MS needs to keep developers of home and office apps happy so they develop yet another new graphics system to replace DirectX. The perception of Windows security has never been lower and is starting to affect sales. IIS is losing ground again to Apache/Linux.
It's time to focus on revenue streams again and the revolutionary, expensive, difficult-to-build features get axed. It's probably not a bad idea. Think about the problems they've had with MS-SQL and ask yourself if you want a similar technology built into every teenager's game and grandmother's email box.
IIRC "NT Object Filing System != WinFS"
WinFS is supposed to be based on SQL Server, when NTOFS was announced, MicroSoft hadn't yet acquired SQL Server.
I thought NTOFS was what morphed into the fast-find thingie that shipped with Office.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
One correction - filesystems (at least most UNIX filesystems) are not constrained to tree structure; the leaf nodes may have any number of parents, i.e. a file may be in any number of directories simultaneously. (Use the "ln" command). And using ln -s you can practically place a directory in any number of parent directories.
I use this to organize my music collection alphabetically by artist, by genre, and by the date I got the music simultaneously. (I tend to be most interested in music I got recently, because I'm not tired of it yet).
I know people tend to organize files and directories in a tree structure anyways. If you ask me that's because people are happy to maintain the analogy of a physical item that can only be in one place at a time - so what does that mean for WinFS?
Except it is relevant because Reiser4 has metadata built-in. WinFS is supposed to be built on top of NTFS but its (NTFS+WinFS) purpose is similar to that of Reiser4.
Time makes more converts than reason
Except it is relevant because Reiser4 has metadata built-in. WinFS is supposed to be built on top of NTFS but its (NTFS+WinFS) purpose is similar to that of Reiser4.
NTFS has always had metadata built in. That's not what WinFS provides.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The key here is this: I am not at all interested in a system that fundamentally assumes I am stupid. I will be utterly devoted to a system that fundamentally assumes I am lazy.
WinFS and masses of metadata assumes the stupid and not the lazy. The reason I don't want to have complicated trees of directories is that i am too damn lazy to do so and maintain it. Requiring me to add masses of metadata instead of a directory heirarchy does not address the problem: I am lazy!
Such a system will work well for limited uses - anything that has self populating metadata (such as music collections where files will either come with suitable metadata attached, or if I rip a CD I'll automatically attach suitable metadata via FreeDB or what have you. Similarly for a certain amount of video etc.
Such a system will work passingly well when you have a reasonable amount of attached metadata automatically, for instance email.
It won't work well for general user created documents and the like.
In the end a lot of data is purely user created - from speadsheets and letters to photos downloaded off digital cameras.
Find a way for me to be lazy and still have quick and easy access to all of those, and then you'll have my interest.
Jedidiah.
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I wrote the first design document for ReiserFS in 1984....
The nice thing about being slow in solving a hard problem is that others are also slow....