"WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things."
Wow...that's a whopper, even for Bill.
For the record, this type of technology is called content management (not to be confused with 'web content management')...and it ain't new, nor is BeFS a particularly unique example.
A number of vendors have robust CM repositories that are far more capable than WinFS 1.0 would have been...including replication, etc:
IBM (DB2 Content Manager - runs on Linux)
Documentum (now EMC)
FileNet
OpenText
...the list goes on, and analyst coverage of such systems is readily available. BeFS, Oracle IFS, and the like hardly show up on the radar in this market, but it's true they have some of the same capabilities.
And as far as using SQL as the programmatic interface to such a system, that approach has its disadvantages - most vendors have developed content-oriented interfaces, and see JSR 170 for the beginnings of a true open standard for such an interface.
WinFS was the *beginning* of a content management strategy for Microsoft, but it certainly didn't address high-volume imaging or report distribution requirements, or many of the other characteristics of CM systems that the market expects.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow...that's a whopper, even for Bill.
For the record, this type of technology is called content management (not to be confused with 'web content management')...and it ain't new, nor is BeFS a particularly unique example.
A number of vendors have robust CM repositories that are far more capable than WinFS 1.0 would have been...including replication, etc:
And as far as using SQL as the programmatic interface to such a system, that approach has its disadvantages - most vendors have developed content-oriented interfaces, and see JSR 170 for the beginnings of a true open standard for such an interface.
WinFS was the *beginning* of a content management strategy for Microsoft, but it certainly didn't address high-volume imaging or report distribution requirements, or many of the other characteristics of CM systems that the market expects.