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WinFS Gets the Axe
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?"
How long has the promise of WinFS been on the table? Microsoft has dragged this teaser on 10-lb test in front of drooling long-time loyalists as the newest and amazingly innovative piece of their "best OS ever". Aside from the fact it really wasn't amazingly innovative (well, in vernacular maybe it was), now they're close to closing the door on this. I wonder how many sales they've pulled off with these lies?
HINT: Here's a snippet from an October 2003 PC World article:
Microsoft may not have thought they were lying at the time but they must have had an idea they not only weren't on target but they weren't even close! It's amazing a company can get away with this -- call it genius marketing, I call it deception at all costs to keep their customer base intact.
Sometimes these outcomes seem to say more about the Microsoft loyalists than Microsoft.
Maybe it was supposed to be "WhenFS?" (FP?)
Their structured, indexed filesystem that operates much like a database, will be released with their database software!
Is it just me, or does that sound slightly redundant?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
a. WinFS had difficulty functioning over a network
b. Microsoft's target customer is business
c. Businesses use networks
Therefore, WinFS would not be suited for business usage, making it unimportant.
Hey, if everyone wants to bag on Microsoft not making a next generation file system, what is stopping Linux and the Open Source community from doing it? Oh, that's right- it's easier to just complain about MS than to actually get your hands dirty. Nevermind then, carry on.
Simply call it what it is, fraud, from a company that knowingly engages in deceptive business practices.
To be fair, I would call this a failure rather than a fraud. They probably believed their own claims about WinFS at the time that they made their promises.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And meanwhile ReiserFS on Linux provides much of the functionality today that WinFS only promised for the future.
Shh.
Windows Vista has now been renamed Windows XP Service Pack 3. More at 11!
What's really sad is that BeOS had a woking usable dbFS TEN YEARS AGO!!!! I bet Visa idles more RAM and CPU resources than an BeBox had to begin with.
Duke Nukem WinFS Edititon
"Copland is to Mac OS 8 as Longhorn is to Vista" seems to be becoming more true every day.
Though it was promised as a fundamentally ground up re-invention (Pink, Copland, System 8), the Mac OS 8 product that was actually shipped was mostly a cosmetic upgrade with the bits of the promised technologies that could be made to work. The new graphics architecture became a new font subsystem. The new document archicture (without developed parts making use of it) became a built-in web architecture. System wide document content searching became better file finding. The goal became to try to keep whatever anticipation was already built but jettison the "hard problems" of making it actually work in the ways that were promised. Tell everyone that Feature X has evovled into something beyond what we had ever anticipated rather than the world passed us by while we were shooting for an old target.
It may be that Microsoft still has the inertia to pull off an almost completely cosmetic update, but it's going to get pretty ardurous environment on the development teams. After all, the goal isn't going to be to even ship a feature reduced product. It's going to be to ship cosmetic filler that covers up the need for what was really promised. Maybe Blackcomb or Fiji or whatever it's called now, will become a stage for the proper solution, but that's a very big IF.
Always thought this would happen. Not only was the original concept of WinFS pretty difficult from a technology point of view, but people at Microsoft suddenly thought: "Hang on. If we deliver a rich database storage engine integrated into Windows then that threatens the existence of SQL Server." This is confirmed quite adquately by this:
"We are choosing now to take the unstructured data support and auto-admin work and deliver it in the next release of MS SQL Server, codenamed Katmai. This really is a big deal - productizing these innovations into the mainline data products makes a big contribution toward the Data Platform Vision we have been talking about."
Notice the word 'productising' (productizing for you yanks). Productising here means "Why give this away for free in Windows where it would actually threaten the existance of SQL Server when we can just bundle it into the next release of SQL Server and charge people more for the *new* features?!". This is confirmation, if ever it were needed, that WinFS is totally dead as a Windows component. You're not going to be able to tag your files, or 'objects, with metadata and search for it seamlessly along with new integrated and built-in Windows file management support out of the box in Windows. Unless of course, you cough up for SQL Server and maybe even some client license add-ons into the bargain.
I also really, really love how every Microsoft employee has it drilled into them from an early age that any decision made, in reality for the pure benefit of Microsoft, is actually a decision made for the benefit of customers and as a result of extensive customer feedback! This is so deeply embedded in them I'm sure they believe it themselves now:
Today I have an update about how we are delivering some of the WinFS technologies. It represents a change to our original delivery strategy, but it's a change that we think that you'll like based on the feedback that we've received....It's great technology and we are super-excited to be productizing this way. And most importantly, it's what people have been asking for - as we work with customers, we're constantly hearing that they want many of the technologies to be more broadly available in the data platform products. That feedback was taken seriously."
Yer. Especially where it means more money for us.......
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. .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.
* 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
* 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
Not that I'm blaming them -- all software designs have limits, past which they can't be stretched any further and still be made to work. But perhaps Microsoft should be looking at starting over with a fresh new OS design (with backwards compatibility provided via virtual machine emulation only, a la MacOS Classic running in MacOS/X)?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
A relational file systems is the next generation of OS design and a necessary evolution of the concept.
Put it this way, your computer stores hundreds of thousands of files, the current paradigm of treating them as files stored in a folder tree is absolutely antiquated and ridiculous.
I should be able to ask my operating system, "Show me all my picture files", and it simply can list ALL the image files on my computer, regardless of how or where they are stored. Features like Spotlight in OS X or Google Desktop are "nice" ways of trying to deal with this problem in a folder tree, but they are just an expensive to generate index file and it takes way too much time to return a result. Spotlight not only has to return if the index entry for a file matches, but it also has to verify if the file still exists on disk. I could take minutes for spotlight or Google desktop to return ALL image files on your computer. You will also notice that these systems often display something like (and 5000 more) link, this means that in order to have the search return results quick enough, it didn't REALLY find all 5000 files, it just says that according to its index file, there appears to be 5000 more image files, when you click on the link, it take more time to finally list all these files. Indexing a folder based tree structure is a solution, but its not an ideal solution. It is limited by the limitations of an antiquated file tree structure.
In a relational file system, if I ask for all image files stored on my computer, the result should be instantaneous, or near to it, as the fact that the file exists as a database entry means the file exists in reality. The time required for the results is simply the time required to build a query and return a result from a database.
Also, why do we even have to name files? Why do we have to give them a file extension. These are all antiquated file system concepts which are completely meaningless for a modern OS. A relational file system stores more then just a file name and a file type, I should be able to search for a file by date, description, keyword in the file, etc, etc, etc. I should not only be allowed to name the file, but provide any meta tags I want to help me locating that file quickly. An extension was a cheap way to get the OS to launch or open a file related to a specific program, but it would be completely unnecessary if the file itself embedded its type or had an entry in a database record. The name of a file would purely be a description and only one of many ways to identify a file.
Ultimately, a relational file system will allow such concepts as "Show me the letter about taxes I wrote to Bob Smith last week." and it will return the email or document you wrote, period. You don't care what the file name is. You don't care what type of file it may be, whether it was an email or text document. A file system should know that a file exists on your computer that is a texted based document, including keywords taxes and Bob that was generated within a week of the current date. This is a sorely needed concept in ANY OS, no OS to date has anything near that powerful a concept. There is no reason for a file system not to be able to handle these requests, and if we EVER want something like what we have seen in Star Trek, where people can ask a computer real language queries, we NEED a relational file system.
Relational files systems will bring a whole new level of superior storage capability to computers that will eventually start storing millions of files. We can't just keep a "lean and mean" tree based folder structure, that paradigm was never intended to manage millions of files.
I applaud Microsoft for at least trying, because unlike Google or Apple, they realize that the future is in a database driving relational file system and not stop gap pseudo-solutions like indexing. Its obviously a difficult concept to implement, but once anyone is able to implement the idea, it will be a VERY welcomed concept and improve the functionality and usability of an operating system. I for one would switch to and swear by ANY OS that implements this idea properly, whether its Linux, OS X, or yes, even Windows.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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.
Where's the "and then some" part? All the new bundled apps in Vista are direct clones of OS X apps, even down to the exact same interface in iCal. Even Vista's filesystem layout is a clone of OS X's, down to the same folder names in the same locations!
If I see one more Microsoft fanboy say Vista is the "biggest change since Windows 3.1 to Windows 95," I'm going to scream, because you're just quoting goofy marketing brochures. The transition to Vista is more like going from 95 to 98. Vista is the same old Windows code with an updated shell and some new APIs and minor features. It's not some huge, revolutionary change. You've been listening to hype for six years and have built Longhorn up in your mind.
No, Microsoft had to start over in 2004 with the "Longhorn reset." Even if they hadn't, where are you getting 6 years? 6 years ago, they were just getting Windows 2000 out the door.
It's not being "blinded by hatred." Even Microsoft's own employees refer to Vista as "broken." It's a massively huge codebase with tons of dependencies and crufty code dating back decades. The new features aren't that new. Vista is a minor accomplishment that will barely get Windows to the point where OS X was in April of 2005, and in many cases, where OS X was in 2001. Watching thumbnail full-motion-video in the taskbar? Please! I was doing that in the 2000 OS X Public Beta.
But hey, if you think translucent windows are some revolutionary OS change, have at it. I, however, predict a flop nearing the level of Windows ME.
"Sufferin' succotash."
This announcement makes more sense than I think people recognize, particularly if you posit that they ran into performance difficulties.
Remember that they were going to put it all into the filesystem? Then they put it into a layer above the FS. Bet you a bitflip that they found performance problems resulting from mixing large files and small files in the same filesystem. It is very easy to have such problems, you have to get quite clever to avoid them, and expend a lot of effort on it. Rather than take the extra time, they pulled the enhanced semantics out of the filesystem. That was the wrong thing. Then, look at the descriptions of how some of the queries they supported took too long. It is really easy to design things in that area wrong, and get unacceptable performance impacts. Rather than solving the deeply challenging problems, they punted and put the stuff into SQL server. Why? Because people who don't want things to be slow can just not use the feature until they figure out how to make it not cost performance. Of course, that means no OS integration but..... it is so nice to not be designing Reiser4 by committee.
I see Microsoft responding to difficult technical problems not by solving them, but by running from them, and that explains the entire trajectory of WinFS.
Another consideration you can see between the lines is that they don't want to lose the revenue from SQL Server by doing everything that it does in the OS and doing it better. Marketers will do things like make the first release of something only available at a higher price. They do that a lot. They'll do it even if it robs Vista of most of its excitement to do it.
Large corporations often have real problems handling tough research projects.
Reiser4 took 5 years to get into working at all (v3), and 10 years of sustained development to get right (reiser4), and it is just the storage layer. You can't do that in a large corporation.
In a large corporation you are thinking that you need 3 years to do a project that is a paradigm change, and you go talk to management, and you sense that they have patience for 9-18 months, and you really want to do the project, so you tell them you can do it in 9-18 months.
18 months go by, and you are 1/2 of the way through the first version (you think you are 90% of the way through), and the first version is going to suck badly and take years to be well optimized. Now, if your product is the first in its market, you can make it even though it sucks, and get the money for the version 2. If you are going into a mature market, well, things are tough. Very tough. WinFS is going into a mature market.
Now, into this reality throw corporate managers. They think that if they intimidate the programmers a lot, products ship sooner. So, technical shortcuts get taken. Only problem is, in a product like WinFS, going into a mature market, taking technical shortcuts kills things. Especially since for a product like WinFS the technical shortcuts affect DEEP decisions that you will never be able to reverse out of. Like, whether the enhanced semantics are in the FS layer. Or whether the whole OS is designed around using the enhanced semantics in every component. Then, managers feel the need to prove they are tough about schedules, and they cancel for being late projects that everyone should have known were going to take a long long time because they were hard. There is some very interesting recent research suggesting that if you want an accurate project length forecast, you don't ask for an estimate, you create a betting pool.
The sad thing is, since everyone copies Microsoft, now there will be more people saying that Reiser4 shouldn't do what WinFS backed away from. We can do it. We solved the hard storage layer design problems, our stuff works. Now we can finally go after the enhanced semantics. It took 10 years, but we got the storage layer into the shape we want it in, and one plugin at a time the enha
Yes, when MS decided to include WGA in Windows Updates, I decided they needed to be sandboxed from my important data.
Synergy is your friend