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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."
What should Hans has to say on this fs.
Chances are, they rushed it out the door and it's going to be absolutely terrible. In other news, Microsoft released something ahead of schedule! Unlike 'Vista' (I'll always call it longhorn)
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
MS just found the backup disk.
A file system that you get by an add-on? What good will that do, most desktops in Windows have partion set to ntfs under XP what do you do with it once you added it on. Is this really a file system or is it a indexer of files.
I wonder if there is a possibility of MS releasing the NTFS specs for the FOSS community once WinFS becomes widely used? That would be great, but seems unlikely.
I realize that this is a story about WinFS, but I'm hoping someone knowledgeable about GNOME Storage is reading.
I'm just wondering if any progress has been made on GNOME Storage or if it's just completely stagnated (a Seth project stagnating? Why I never!). My guess is all he did was some special natural language interface (which should have been an add-on later) and did no real work on a relational file system.
I wish that guy would finish something for once.
I hope people find it usefull. I tried the Vista beta a month or so ago and I wasn't impressed one bit. Nothing felt different or improved. I don't know if I was expecting some radical changes, but other than the "theme", it looked the same as XP. In fact, judging from "look and feel" it rendered the clear type fonts very blurry compared to xorg on gentoo which I'm currently typing this on.
However, the only thing I can saw I was pleased about was its performance. On a 2.4 ghz celeron with 512 mb of ram, it ran fine, just as fast as XP on the same system.
What did impress me about a week later was when I took that spare HD I used for vista and loaded OSX on it. Now that looked beautiful, ran fast, ran native OSX apps fine, and my conclusion from that week of OS experimentation was that if OSX ever made it to whitebox computers legally (let's not start this discussion again) it would knock Microsoft out of the water.
Let's face it, few home users will switch to Vista legally. Most will get it with a new computer. My school uses Windows 2000 and probably won't switch to even XP for a while. So go figure.
Seriously, if this is being backported to XP then what will be the difference between XP and Vista? Afaik all the avalon and .net libraries are being backported. All i can think of is a glass looking interface, some toolbars and a bunch of wizards?
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
WinFS is not a separate filesystem. It uses NTFS as the filesystem, but then stores metadata on top of that (the same way other filesystems like HFS+ have for years).
You don't need to reform to WinFS, it's not a filesystem, but a relational database that carries metadata about existing files on an NTFS partition.
WinFS
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
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.
When buying a Vista license, you'll be paying for XP a second time ... but you're really saving in the TCO.
Yeah, I should use a Microsoft beta file system, because my files and documents aren't in enough danger as it is....
...aaaand I just bluescreened my brain.
Seriously, is there an upside to this system to the casual-to-serious user? Or is it mostly a DRM-delivery platform? I read TFAs, but this sentence hurt me: "(Integrated data initiative is a term used to refer to a group of technologies whose goal is to provide better integration for data..."
There's a reason Vista took so long to develop and it wasn't the end user interface
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If this is an add-on which interfaces to the kernel through an API it should be possible to get it to run under Wine, right? I'm fairly ignorant about how Wine works, so I'm wondering. That would be cool to have WinFS running on Linux.
Well, of course, things went pretty smoothly. Users were able to easily convert their partitions to NTFS when upgrading (even if they didn't know what a partition was). New PCs came with NTFS by default, and Windows XP+NTFS succeeded largely (unless you're a Linux fanboy and don't want to admit it; in that case it never happened, how could it?). The (Windows) world was a better place now that FAT32 was largely a thing of the past. I'm not so sure if WinFS will be all that great, but we'll see.
Windows Vista will be no different than the 98 to XP conversion. NTFS users will be able to easily convert their partitions. Again, they will be able to do it even if they don't know what it is exactly. As long as they know it's recommended, they will keep clicking the Next button. You're worrying about something that will clearly never happen, given Microsoft's track record.
The add-on will likely be via Windows Update and extremely simple to apply. People who buy PCs after the add-on is released won't even have to do that. They will just have WinFS.
I also want to touch upon the phrase "idiot windows users" that you used. Saying something like that only serves to make you sound like an idiot. Windows users are largely novices, but you can't expect everyone to be an expert user able to keep up with the quirks of Linux et al. Calling Windows users idiots is like calling people who drive car's with automatic transmissions idiots. Sure, automatics are easier to learn to use, but that doesn't make those drivers idiots.
Now, I could go on to write a whole article bashing Geek Squad, but that would be pointless since we all know they suck and they overcharge.
-William Brendel
Right now you can add attributes to NTFS files, but there's no decent way to do it. Likewise, ANY DB-style FS is going to be limited to the ways that the vendor (MS) provides for you to access the data. Remember those ridiculous dialogs Winword used to prompt with? Asking all that crap about the author, and topic, etc. etc. until you asked Clippy how to turn the fscking thing off?
The "DB based FS" is only as good as the data that you put in, unless you solely want to make virtual folders of "all my MP3s that I warez'd last week from Rancid", but I'd say those sorts of things are going to be in the minority.. and again, depend on the metadata of said pirate MP3s.
Now there will be code jocks out there who would LOVE this sort of thing, since you could probably use it as a halfway decent free CVS replacement, but I'm thinking more of Joe and Jane Sixpack. How is it going to make their AOL experience better?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
You are (deliberately?) misunderstanding what WinFS is designed to accomplish.
Locking out Linux/Samba clients and servers?
2) Release an add-on with "BETA" in the title
Works for Google.
99% of windows users have no need for partitioning their hard drive. Do you know what happens most of the time when people create windows partitions? Someone thinks they are clever and creates seperate partition for their data, another for their programs, and another for a swap file, etc... This whole system quickly breaks down when one partition becomes full.
Eh, no. Seperating user data from applications is a very good idea. It has saved me a lot of time and trouble (on Windows and Unix) when things went wrong, and I've helped other people who really wished that they'd done it too.
i bet WINFS is not much more advanced than the ancient BeFS was. but im open to let my friend Bill and his crew convince me with their linux version of it...
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Under what circumstances have you seen SQL Server be "unstable"? I've been a database guy for a *long* time and I've never seen any kind of "crashing". You're talking about a pretty prestigious database. Not quite on par with Oracle, but there's no comparison with something like MySQL.
I don't respond to AC's.
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
In 2003? Jesus Christ!
I seem to remember that in 1994, Cairo was all the rage. Hell, it has been an idea since 1991. If I did not toss them out before I moved into my current house, I'd have scans of each individual article in Windows Magazine about Cairo from 1994, 1995, and 1997.
WinFS is not even close to being called "new."
It's hard to be too impressed. The AS/400 had this 20 years ago.
Control? I think you mean money.
You still need an indexing service.
All that metadata isn't just going to poof out of the thin air. Metadata where it gets entered (save dialog in office, ID3 tags, thumbnails on pictures, etc.) needs to find it's way into this API, or it needs to be programmatically extracted by background processes.
I actually like the latter, it takes the burden off the applications.
Also, it'd be nice if concepts like the "Recently Used Files" and stuff like that gets rolled into it (that is, recently used is just a metadata field and the RUF directory is a "view" or "Select" against the database with appropriate criteria).
It's too bad WinFS isn't a real database-backed file store. Because then you could do all sorts of weird stuff... (and it's easy enough to provide a compatibility layer for a hierarchical-filesystem-assuming Win32 API)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I worked at MS on filesystems for a dozen years, and I totally agree with you. WinFS has been kicked around (and cancelled) since OS/2 days at Microsoft. Its a conflation of abstractions that needlessly complicate the data-structure of the file system. System recovery will probably be completely impossible in WinFS. And it can only slow down the system. And what does it buy the user? Faster file search. Except it will be beyond most users comprehension; a recipe for disaster rivalled only by the registry.
...A microsoft supported file sharing program! wait... what does the FS stand for again?
Someone will probably have at least partial support for it before it ever even gets out of beta.
And then it will stay only partially supported for 10+ years, just like the NTFS support.
One may or may not agree with the guys opinions (especially about his stance on non-technical issues), but the fact is that Hans Reiser is one of the top experts in the field of filesystems.
I for one would like to know what Hans has to say on this fs.
The filesystem is the package manager
Wow. 15 minutes and you still haven't been modded Flamebait or Troll. Very impressive.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
RTM = Release To Manufacturer.
Took me a while to find out. *sigh*
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
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.
From Rob Pike's slashdot interview:
5) Database filesystems - by defile The buzz around filesystems research nowadays is making the UNIX filesystem more database-ish. The buzz around database research nowadays is making the relational database more OOP-ish.
This research to me sounds like the original designers growing tired of the limitations of their "creations" now that they're commodities and going back to the drawing board to "do things right this time". I predict the reinvented versions will never catch on because they'll be too complex and inaccessible.
Of course, this second system syndrome isn't just limited to systems. It happens to bands, directors, probably in every creative art.
I think what we've got in the modern filesystem and RDBMS is about as good as it gets and we should move on. What do you think?
Pike: " This is not the first time databases and file systems have collided, merged, argued, and split up, and it won't be the last. The specifics of whether you have a file system or a database is a rather dull semantic dispute, a contest to see who's got the best technology, rigged in a way that neither side wins. Well, as with most technologies, the solution depends on the problem; there is no single right answer.
What's really interesting is how you think about accessing your data. File systems and databases provide different ways of organizing data to help find structure and meaning in what you've stored, but they're not the only approaches possible. Moreover, the structure they provide is really for one purpose: to simplify accessing it. Once you realize it's the access, not the structure, that matters, the whole debate changes character.
One of the big insights in the last few years, through work by the internet search engines but also tools like Udi Manber's glimpse, is that data with no meaningful structure can still be very powerful if the tools to help you search the data are good. In fact, structure can be bad if the structure you have doesn't fit the problem you're trying to solve today, regardless of how well it fit the problem you were solving yesterday. So I don't much care any more how my data is stored; what matters is how to retrieve the relevant pieces when I need them.
Grep was the definitive Unix tool early on; now we have tools that could be characterized as `grep my machine' and `grep the Internet'. GMail, Google's mail product, takes that idea and applies it to mail: don't bother organizing your mail messages; just put them away for searching later. It's quite liberating if you can let go your old file-and-folder-oriented mentality. Expect more liberation as searching replaces structure as the way to handle data.
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;