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WinFS Gets the Axe

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shell-games dept.

commander salamander writes "Over at the WinFS Team Blog, Quentin Clark states that Microsoft no longer plans to ship WinFS as a standalone software component. Instead, portions of the underlying technology will be included with the next release of SQL Server (codename Katmai) and ADO.NET. Does this spell the end for the true relational storage paradigm that Microsoft has been promising since Windows 95?"

3 of 610 comments (clear)

  1. Vista has leprosy by MrCopilot · · Score: 5, Informative
    Does Vista have software leprosy?

    From the almighty Wiki:

    * WinFS is the codename for a planned relational database layer built on top of NTFS, and is loosely based on SQL Server 2005. In August 2004, Microsoft announced that WinFS would not be included in Windows Vista. This was due to time constraints in developing the technology. Microsoft has been working on this technology since the mid 1990s. For a time, Microsoft had said that WinFS would be released separately of Vista, but on June 23, 2006, Microsoft announced that they decided to integrate some of the developed features into the next versions of ADO.NET and SQL Server, effectively cancelling the WinFS project.
    * Due to scheduling issues, the Windows PowerShell, code-named Monad will not be included in Windows Vista. However, Microsoft has announced that it will be available as a separate download in the fourth quarter of 2006
    * Owing to significant difficulties in getting third-party developers to support the system (particularly due to the lack of support for writing for the Trusted Operating Root using .NET managed code), the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base architecture was abandoned for Windows Vista.[14] Some aspects of the NGSCB initiative, such as support for Trusted Platform Module chips, are still present, though its role is now limited to being a provider of cryptographic functions which will support BitLocker Drive Encryption.
    * Support for Intel's Extensible Firmware Interface was originally slated to be included with Vista, but has been removed due to what Microsoft has described as a lack of support on desktop computers.[15] The UEFI 2.0 specification (which replaces EFI 1.10) wasn't completed until early 2006, and as of mid-2006, no firmware manufacturers have completed a production implementation. Microsoft has stated that it intends on incorporating 64-bit UEFI support into a future update to Vista, but 32-bit UEFI will not be supported.
    * PC-to-PC Sync, a Peer-to-peer technology for synchronizing folders on multiple computers running Vista, was removed due to quality concerns. It may arrive sometime in the future in some form.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#XP_feat ures_dropped

    Well, all I know is, everytime I think of cutting up my partition for Vista Beta, I end up in the shower sobbing Unclean, Unclean. Still haven't tried it, Would be nice to skip this whole OS cycle.

    Still a proud debian pc.

    --
    OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
  2. Uhhh no. by flithm · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm a supporter of open source software as much as the next guy, and I wish what you said were true, but it simply isn't.

    Reiser, JFS, and EXT3 are definitely journaled, and they do allow metadata to be stored with files, but they're NOTHING like what was intended with WinFS. And in all actuality WinFS doesn't really count as a filesystem per se, at least not like the ones you mentioned.

    WinFS sits on top of NTFS, and is nothing more than an abstraction layer. It lets you do potentially crazy things like (and I'm making this up, purely for example purposes): "SELECT * FROM documents WHERE type IS image AND SOUNDSLIKE ohhhyeaahh"

    If you're curious what WinFS is all about give the wikipedia entry a read.

    The closest comparison (I can think of) to WinFS in the open source world (which one would argue is already better since it's not total vaporware) is Gnome Storage. There's also GnomeVFS, and the creators of the now defunct BeOS had a wonderfully similar BFS that supported relational style queries. There's probably tons more that I'm not aware of as well.

    I predict we'll begin to see more and more of these abstracted file system layers in the future, but they're no replacement for (and will be useless without) an underlying filesystem architecture like Reiser, XFS, NTFS, etc, etc.

  3. Incorrect..... by kaiwai · · Score: 5, Informative
    They announced they were cutting it from Vista (then known as Longhorn) in August 2004 - http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/188339_msft cuts28.html.

    The original announcement then was that WinFS would not ship in the RTM of Microsoft Windows, and instead, it'll be offered at a later date, as either a seperate download or part of a service pack.

    The new article says that they won't ship it at all, not even as a seperate download.

    So lets recap, it goes from being included to shipping seperately to not shipping at all.