Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 18th May 2008 12:59 UTC, submitted by Adam S
Back when Windows Vista was still known as Windows Longhorn, the operating system contained a very interesting and promising feature, a feature promoted as one of the 'pillars' of Longhorn: WinFS. WinFS was a storage subsystem for Windows, based on a relational database, that could contain whatever data you wanted to put in it. Thanks to the relational properties of the database, you could then create relationships between data, or let the computer do that for you.
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Member since:
2005-06-29
Please, people, read the article PROPERLY before spouting NONSENSE. ZFS, Beagle, Spotlight - they're all awesome, but have absolutely NOTHING to do with the technologies behind WinFS or the original WinFS project that led to their creation.
ZFS is an advanced filesystem that allows for things like volume snapshots and copy-on-write. Indexers and query tools like Beagle and Spotlight index the data on your hard drive, and expose that index to the user through what is in essence a glorified search dialog. All these technologies do their job well, they're useful, and I wouldn't want to live without Spotlight on my Mac.
WinFS has little to do with searching and indexing, and more to do with managing. WinFS allowed you to set relations between objects, and use those relations to manage and organise your data - either manually, or automatically via applications. To achieve this goal, it used a relational database, as described rather well in the interview.
Please, people, I know it's fashionable to discredit anything Microsoft does, but the ideas behind WinFS were sound, and the goals ambitious. They failed a lot of times to bring these concepts to your doorstep, but it seems, judging by the words of Clark, that they heave learned from these errors and are now working at in a different way: ensure a solid base, and build up the house from there.
In the interview, you can clearly read that the idea of bringing WinFS' features to the desktop are not quite dead just yet. And you can be anti-Microsoft all you want, but I'm excited about that.