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
Too bad all of those are more or less dead ends. I would love something like this to come to fruition, so that we can finally have the kind of actions and applications Microsoft touted back in 2003 and Longhorn.
Of course, Beagle isn't dead, but Beagle is not a relational database-based "filesystem" - it's an indexer and query tool. Also nice, but in essence it's got as much to do with WinFS as a spoon has to do with a pig.
Member since:2005-07-06
WinFS is like Beagle - neither of them are a real filesystem (WinFS sits on top of NTFS), and both use indexing and so on to offer an alternative way of finding and using your data. The WinFS model is more advanced, I agree, but Beagle is working right now.
The other projects I linked against offer many concepts and code that /could/ be used to create an awful new tag-based or database-like filesystem. Maybe they are dead end just because people don't care about it.
Member since:
2005-07-06
some interesting projects:
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/
http://www.glscube.org/
http://relfs.sourceforge.net/
http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/dbfs/
http://beagle-project.org/