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WinFS Beta 1 Released Early
Mouldy Punk writes "Infoworld is reporting that WinFS Beta 1 has been released. The new relational file system for Windows is posted on MSDN Subscriber Downloads. This release is designed to offer developers a preview of WinFS capabilities. WinFS will be in beta when Windows Vista ships and will RTM afterwords. WinFS, when it ships, will be available for download for Windows Vista and possible support for Windows XP is being considered. The distribution mechanism for WinFS will be through an add-on download much like the .NET framework is today. Tom Rizzo also notes that there is a new blog dedicated to Win FS."
When Microsoft first introduced WinFS in 2003, the company said it would include a new synchronization engine that could index a host of disparate Windows files
I'll bet it is based on the Unix 'file' command.
I've seen a lot of stuff about WinFS and I do RTFA, but I'm still a little puzzled. Is this supposed to be like a labeling file-system where instead of having folders you apply labels to each file (document, music, etc.) similar to Google Mail's system? That's what I think of when I think of "relational" as in database design.
But from what I've heard, WinFS sits atop of NTFS and simply connects it to a SQL database for indexing. How the hell is this revolutionary. You could place all your files in a "My Documents" folder and then make a nice pretty front end to it, categorizing each file, and then hacking the file chooser to use your interface.
I really think Microsoft should have though harder about this and made it a real filesystem with a new structure and layout on disk. It could have really be different and revolunatory, but from what I can tell, it's just a layer now and offers nothing really new or innovative.
You are (deliberately?) misunderstanding what WinFS is designed to accomplish. But like everyone else you seem to have made up your mind. Whereas you avoid mention of the numerous limitations that traditional filesystems like ext2 and even journalled filesystems have.
Be's indexed and journalled filesystem would be the nearest equivalent to WinFS that I can think of, yes, but they didn't use XML. Just plain old metadata ...
:)
If WinFS could do for WinAMP what BeFS allowed SoundPlay+BIYS to do, I'd be a happy camper. However, I haven't tried XP Media Center, so maybe they did better than BIYS. Who knows?
Are they going to "fix" the performance problems in NTFS? I've done a comparison several times, usually dual-booting on the exact same hardware.
Every time I've compared filesystems even EXT2 and EXT3 spank NTFS. More modern filesystems like Reiser and XFS do even better.
My comparison is usually building a large application, so it involves a lot of small-file I/O. And I mean serious perf problems, like 30% to 40% differences in build time.
I am a .NET developer by trade (but use a Mac at home and my Intel boxes run Linux).
In response to the idea that WinFS is going to get it's indexing power from a custom SQL engine, I have to say that SQL Server on our XP boxes isn't reliable enough to use an an integral part of the file system. IT JUST IS NOT! Consider how many implementations of home and small business users won't have the benefit of IT support staff. Sure there are implementations of SQL on XP that are stable and blah blah blah, but we deal with SQL crashing in dev or even production environments regularly. Sometimes it is just restarting SQL that does the trick, sometimes it halts the whole server.
Point is I don't want something as critical as my OS file system relying on SQL to tell me if my files should be backed up or not...one bad worm and bad news for everyone!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Well, there's really no conversion that happens between ext2 and ext3... the only difference between the two is that ext3 uses a journal. If you disable the journal on an ext3 partition, it effectively becomes ext2.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
agreed. My only hope is that it could do this over multiple volumes. With my media collection spanning multiple harddrives, it would be nice to have it aggrigate them into on logical volume, and organise them by metadata (tv show, movie, music album, etc) now, will somebody port something similar to linux so i can lay this ontop of the ext3 filesystems i currently use.
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
The joke goes that the "XP" in Windows XP are realy the Greek letters Chi Rho.
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/48/
And an excerpt...
If WinFS gets out of this beta stage then I will be amazed.
I had an e-mail exchange with Bill Hilf, and he was able to point out a couple of fairly significant differences that *are* going to make it into Vista.
Probably the most interesting to the Linux community is that the services for Unix (SFU) POSIX-compliancy layer is going to be running at the same level as the Win32 execution code. They aren't going to be nested, they're going to be parallel. Theoretically, it might even be possible to replace USER, GDI, and EXPLORER with your favourite X server and DE/WM. Theoretically. I won't be able to tell for sure until I get my hands on a copy, and I cancelled my subscription to MSDN years ago.
Maybe somebody else who actually has a copy can expand on it....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Your description sounds an awful lot like what the AS400 team used to describe when I worked at companies that had good AS400 techies. It hybridized the mainframe-style contiguous file allocations with an integrated RDBMS that tracked the file information, much as the file information pages do with other file systems.
I find it interesting that so many "advances" other systems are making nowadays sound exactly like what the AS400 developers used to talk about. Using databases to store configuration information. Making the database an integral part of the OS. Virtualizing all storage so the system could shuffle files based on size changes and usage patterns to minimize head thrashing. Using wizards/forms for adding new software, changing configurations, etc.
I guess it's all considered "new" because so few people ever actually learned anything about the AS400 internals -- they just used them and counted on the system to do it's job properly.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Ok, fine... you have just heaps of data, with a myriad of references to them.
What then is delete? How does a user distinguish between "remove an association from the blob of data" vs "remove this blob of data altogether". Should the blob automatically delete when you remove all metadata around it? If not, how will you find it again? If so, would you really want data vanishing just because you removed a keyword?
What does partial backup look like on a system? How can you have a combination of partial backups and know you have a whole? I can do that with a set of five directories. Let's say you tag a set of files with "project fred". But one small file, that you almost never care about, gets tagged with "project ferd". What good is the ol' Fred backup now?
At some core level these blobs of data that users place on a system need ONE meaningful location where they always "are". You need someplace where the file will always be, no matter what other associations you remove. You need somewhere you know it will be to assure yourself EVERYTHING you care about is backed up or moved between systems.
The perfection you seek can just as easily be obtained with files in directories that allow metadata on top of them and things like smart folders that are essentially queries over the user-defined and automatically extracted metadata. In fact I think that's what WinFS does anyway (just like OS X does today).
If you really like the system you describe nothing is stopping you from storing all your files in a DB and writing an explorer on top of that. Yet all this time, things like that have never taken off in the market.
Some things do not take off because the technology to make the useful has not yet arrived. But some things simply never take off because in practice they are not practical, and the filesystem as a full-fledged database with no default structure is one of those things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People seem to think WinFS is about the user experience -- where your files will be kept instead of folders, what meta data you can search on or what the new Explorer will look like. Somebody on the WinFS blog wanted screenshots (even). But it's really about programming standards and flexibility. When you write a program, almost the first thing you do is create a data format which might be an XML or RDBMS Schema or a text file format with a lot of commas. If you want to share that data between apps or between computers, you really have to create your own API with users and security and all of that junk. In general, you have to do a lot of the low level stuff. If it's built into the OS, it's a terrific thing. It just has to be efficient. MySQL is integral to the LAMP platform. Maybe it's not a file system, but from a programming perspective, that's what it is. Screenshots of MySQL aren't exciting, but having a ubiquitous MySQL with a direct API through the OS integrated with the OS security would be nice. Maybe that's what WinFS will partly be.
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
Reiser4 is technologically ahead of WinFS as a high performance storage layer, see www.namesys.com for details on its design. When you do this layering the way they did it, with the metadata stored in a layer above the FS rather than integrated into it, you lose a lot of performance while gain the advantage of successfully avoiding dealing with a host of technical issues. We are at least 5 years ahead of them technically in the storage layer.
That said, semantic enhancements matter more than performance, and it is better to do something semantically than to do nothing, and what Linux currently is doing is nothing.
The political support for adding semantic enhancements to Linux namespaces is mixed at best. I worry we will see that death by committee rules, and there will be no belief that each FS should try to innovate in its own way and compete with the others until one is proven the right solution. We are in serious danger of having MS implement bad technology, and Linux having to devote large amounts of resources to copying it in 5 years because we were late and chose to trail rather than lead. If the filesystems were free to compete in semantics, we could have one or several of the Linux filesystems leading them instead.
SQL and the relational model is fundamentally the wrong model for semi-structured data. See www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html for why.
Technically, I would worry much more about Apple. Dominic Giampaolo is very bright, and well funded. His chances of delivering on a good set of semantics are high because he and Jobs are very sharp, and neither of them is afraid to go where no one has gone before. Our chances of losing technically to Giampaolo and Jobs are high, because we are frankly not well funded, and a lot of us are complacent with semantics that are still pretty much the same as their father's Unix box.
So, in summary, I would say that we are still ahead but losing speed fast.
Thanks for your kind words Hisham.
Have you ever seen a `My Documents' folder of someone who doesn't want to know about computers? No wonder they're always complaining that `it doesn't work.'
/mnt/Music/ /Anime /Metal /Dream Theater /Images and Words /... /OST /Boondock Saints /Kill Bill /... /Guitar /Classical /Shred /... ...
Yes, I have seen the "My Documents" folder of my mother's account. And as you say she has like 500 documents, including MS Explorer saved files AND their corresponding folders to hold images and misc binary files.
Yes I know that for me it is really stupid, as I tend to order every thing on its subfolder. For example let me tell you how I order my music:
blah blah, you get the idea.
And, althoug I have heard the marvelous things that programs as iTunes, Win.Media Player, Winamp Media Library or even MusicMatch jukebox do to order music libraries I still cant get one that I find really useful.
Maybe for a lot of us that is THE way to do it, but see, my mother, as a lot of computer users is just a Biology teacher. She knows the minimum required to do what she NEEDS to do in her computer (Word, Excel, Power Point) you just need to understand that people does not have the model in their heads, I mean, the model of the file system, that you/we automatically recall when we open the Windows Explorer/Knoqueror/etc...
That attitude (of the most people you are talking about) to me is just like, for instance: ``I don't want to learn about strings and notes, I just want to play the guitar!''
Now, as an example, Think about the WinFS like Gmail, I really found the Gmail approach useful, more if I have thousands of mail. If you see, desktop search bars have gained a lot of acceptance these days.
That is because we no longer know what each file in our computer does, and we do not have to care. We need to get exactly the file that we need when we need it, and you can do that searching.
Now before ranting about the facts I gave, just take my last paragraph and replace the word file with mail and instead of a Microsoft technology you will have a Google technology, is it bad? no, I really dont care where all my files go, if I need to have some files classified then a Tag would be great. otherwise I just want the OS to identify it when I ask for it.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
At the application level, this, and this are two possible answers, or at least workarounds. On the filesystem level, this could be a possible workaround as well.
I agree however that it would seem people have been caught with their pants down in regards to WinFS though. The usual sentiment about it among Linux peeps from what I've seen is that it either isn't doable, or that it is, but that it'd be horribly slow.
Methinks a change in attitude is called for, however. This could very well be Bill's answer to the One Ring if he gets it out, which is presumably why Microsoft are trying to get a working release ASAP. Forget the coder bias for a minute here, and think about what the implications of this could be from the perspective of ease-of-use...and then think about what a battle we'd have converting people to Linux if we still don't have it when Microsoft does.
Longhorn was intended to be a Linux killer...but of all the elements I've seen, WinFS is the only one which could truly cause us problems...Especially when you consider how difficult back-engineering compatibility with such an FS would probably be.
As I said, I'm aware WinFS hasn't been taken seriously around here so far...but somebody needs to start to.
Rather than addressing the real problem of why nontechnical users had trouble finding where their files were, the idiot UI designer for WinFS decided to take idiocy to its most proper level: at no time should a user ever be able to find a file.
As an aside, the Windows Search function has to be the worst thing ever written - even after you remove the mutt. Many times I've used it to search for filenames (not even text within files), only to be told that there are no results. Yet I know the file is there. Sure enough, after painful manual searching that the Search function is supposed to do for me, I find the file, and every time the filename matched the spec I chose. Let's hope WinFS actually allows people to find their files - at the moment, this doesn't happen 100% of the time.
> Think about the WinFS like Gmail, I really found the Gmail approach
> useful, more if I have thousands of mail.
I disagree. I have a Gmail account, which I use for just a few things; it probably has a few hundred messages in it at this point, which is to say, practically nothing.
I also have a *real* mail account, and I get the mail from that in Gnus, and store it using the nnml backend. I have at this point about 2GB of mail stored that way on my system.
I have greater difficulty using and finding things in the gmail account.
Granted, it took longer to *learn* to use Gnus, but once I got past that initial learning point, it's significantly easier to use on a day-to-day basis. If I had to handle in Gmail all of the mail that I handle from my primary account, I could not do it.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The root of the problem is that most people do not care where their files are located. They just want it to work. That attitude (of the most people you are talking about) to me is just like, for instance: ``I don't want to learn about strings and notes, I just want to play the guitar!''
Bah. Most people use their computer because they have to in order to do work. And, honestly, it's not such a terrible request that the computer be easier to use. Half of the things that the user is required to manage should be managed by reasonable defaults.
As a small aside, Novell has ported it's high-performance file system, NSS, to Linux. The first implementation is pretty clunky (requires its own physical array) and Reiser has a leg-up on a couple of items (like block suballocation), but it shows a lot of promise, especially if you run a good-sized network.
Regards;