Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 18th May 2008 12:59 UTC, submitted by Adam S
Microsoft 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.
Thread beginning with comment 314708
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE: *nix alternatives
by Thom_Holwerda on Sun 18th May 2008 15:30 UTC in reply to "*nix alternatives"
Thom_Holwerda
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.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1

RE[2]: *nix alternatives
by evert on Sun 18th May 2008 15:38 in reply to "RE: *nix alternatives"
evert 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.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3

RE[3]: *nix alternatives
by bornagainenguin on Mon 19th May 2008 02:26 in reply to "RE[2]: *nix alternatives"
bornagainenguin Member since:
2005-08-07

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.


Interesting thread here, and I'm giving up my ability to mod in this article to point out there is a new kid on the block (according to my copy of LXF105 any way, website looks like its been around awhile--maybe under a different name?) called Recoll.

http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/

Supposedly it uses less resources to do what beagle does and is faster as well....time will tell.

--bornagainpenguin

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 3