[plug] winfs

[Steve Baker]

Craig Ringer wrote:

> 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).

Oracle developed a filesystem front-end to their database server a few 
years back.  Dropping files onto your 'O:' drive stores them in the 
databases as BLOBs.  The nice bit is that it can 'read' HTML, PDF, ms 
office docs (word, excel, etc) and index the content.  I think it 
supports quite a few other document types as well.  You can then do a 
regular windows search for files with a particular file name or 
containing whatever text, just like now, and the database would use the 
indexes to find matching files rather than examining each file when you 
did the search.

> 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.

I don't think you've missed anything.  Although it's going to be a while 
yet before we see it, and I don't know how popular it will be.  I saw 
all the demos of the Oracle Filesystem, and it looks great, but I don't 
personally know of anyone using it.

Steve