[plug] winfs

[Craig Ringer]

On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 05:54, Garry wrote:

> http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39147566,00.htm
> 
> Isn't what MS is trying to achieve with WinFS already available by using
> mounted partitions via NFS on *nix?

I don't see how.

> Or am I missing something?

I suspect so. If I understand correctly, WinFS is intended to provide a
database-backed filesystem, where all files have detailed metadata
that's indexed in the DB. A user could open "the file I wrote in '92
about fish" instead of "My Documents\weirdstudy\johndory\jdgulls.doc".
I'm not aware of any production FS, *NIX or otherwise, that makes this
practical without special app support (eg app-level indexing).

It's an idea that's been around for a little while. Unless I've missed
something, MS are doing it an interesting way - they seem to want to put
the filesystem in a modified RDBMS data store (MS-SQL server), rather
than extend the FS to support database-like semantics.

Hans Reiser is working on things in the other direction (which makes
more sense to me). Check out http://namesys.com/ for some interesting,
though long and often hard going, reading.

Craig Ringer