For months, Microsoft watchers have voiced concerns that delays in the company’s introduction of its Yukon database software could derail other products, including a new version of Windows, Longhorn.
The Long Road to Yukon
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Eugenia Loli
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that Schlonghorn would get delayed because of the delay in Yukon. WinFS is supposed to be based on SQL Server in order for it to have an enhanced search capability. I’m kind of surprised that it is going to be such a long time before the next version of SQL Server rolls out– SQL Server 2000 is going to age markedly compared to other products. Here’s hoping MySQL has support for stored procedures by ’06– I was rather disappointed that it didn’t get in to version 4.0.x.
With Microsoft’s continued security problems and continued drive to stricter and stricter DRM where people have less and less freedom using their products. Not to mention the high initial cost for server client licenses and the high cost for all of their licenses compared to competing products. I can only see more and more companies moving away from Microsoft and moving to Linux and Mac OS X.
Before you laugh about Mac OS X. I point to the success of Virginia Tech and their super computer currently ranking 3rd fastest in the world. And this with them only having those G5s out for a short time now. Things will only get better with them and they have generated a LOT of interest in all areas where ultimate performance is needed. No not every needs a super computer. But Apple is shining right now in how IBM could deliver the chips and Mac OS X was able to run so efficiently.
For those companies not willing to shell out the money for Mac OS X. There is Linux. Both in servers and the desktop Microsoft’s mindshare is cracking and crumbling.
Oh so typical. Microsoft has had a long history of selling stuff which isn’t there yet. It’s called ‘vapourware’. And by the time longhorn ships, I bet it’ll be a major dissapointment. All those new features are nice, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Windows System drags a long tail of legacy behind it. Supporting old software demands concessions, and usually the new features are the first to fall victim. WinFS? Nice idea, but the legacy application marker will kill it. That’s my theory, and I stick to it until it actually releases! 🙂
From the article:
“I think a lot of people have the impression that Yukon is buried in WinFS, and Microsoft is starting to take pains to remove that impression from people’s minds,” Alliegro said.
The impression I get is that MS forked Yukon at some point to reuse stuff like the ObjectSpaces O/R Mapping feature (In case you haven’t noticed, WinFS is more of an object database than a SQL database, thought you can use T-SQL stored procedures to get at it). Maybe they update from the main Yukon source tree on occasion too. I don’t know.
What I worry about more is the delay in the server side of all this new Longhorn stuff. So far the word is it’ll come out after the Longhorn client. At work, a shared server based WinFS store is much more interesting to me. A WinFS based Exchange server would be even better. I’m not sure if the plan is to have plain WinFS stores be the primary interface, or whether this similar stuff in Yukon will be the preferred way. I worry we’ll end up with two similar but incompatible APIs. It would be stupid to go this far revamping Windows just to end up with that.
Oracle’s Collaboration Suite already does all this.
Common storage for everything, email, files, documents, voice mail etc.
Unified searching across everything, universal access (SMB/CIFS/NFS/IMAP/http), file versioning, and excellent access control.
It is a complete PITA to install and get working though. Not surprisingly.
I will look forward to the “next generation” of storage and data/document management solutions from Microsoft.
A “better fileserver than a fileserver”, so to speak.
Foz
I don’t know why this analyst has chosen to tie Yukon into the Longhorn timeframe? No public announcements from MS have done so – in fact, quite the contrary. Yukon is part of the Whidbey wave – i.e. second half of next year (2004). I would imagine we’ll see a wide beta by Q2, as the hope expressed by MS folks is a September/October 2004 final release candidate.
I think people (and by people I mean ‘analysts’, as opposed to ‘intelligent and informed readers of this site’
) have got confused by the fact that the PDC ‘goods’ contained Longhorn, Yukon and Whidbey, and that the *Longhorn* SDK happens to integrate into the Whidbey IDE (which is great for dogfooding the new OS and dev tools).
They’re otherwise unconnected.
I found out that Yukon will be implementing the TRANSFORM/PIVOT SQL statement to allow for trivially easy construction of crosstab queries, just like Access has got.
OSNews recently posted an article on crosstab queries where this was being discussed. Sorry, I’m too lazy to dig up the links right now.