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Actually Microsoft tried this idea themselves with WinFS. It was planned for Vista but eventually the project was stopped because it was too much effort. I coul

Actually Microsoft tried this idea themselves with WinFS. It was planned for Vista but eventually the project was stopped because it was too much effort. I could imagine this to be really useful if it was possible to add arbitrary custom attributes.

echelon 7y ago
Does anyone have the story on why this project was actually halted? It reportedly sounded like it would have been a giant leap at the time, had it actually landed.
- krylon 7y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1svf88/why_winfs_died_long/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1svf88/why_win...
  - iso-8859-1 7y ago
    That discussion doesn't contain any high quality posts, why not link the actual article? http://hal2020.com/2013/02/14/winfs-integratedunified-storage-and-microsoft-part-1/ http://hal2020.com/2013/02/14/winfs-integratedunified-storag...
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  Probably because it was a dumb idea. There's no sense storing videos, baby photos and "quarterly report new (2) backup newest 08.2019_john.xlsx" in a database.
  - BlackRing 7y ago
    If the filesystem itself was modeled after a database (which it can be argued it is, somewhat), it's not much of a stretch for WinFS to have been a thing. I was looking forward to seeing it in action based on reports of what it was.
    - simonh 7y ago
      File systems are databases in a small way. They use b-trees and such, but they don't enforce a rigorous global type system, don't enforce a table structure because everything has to have a schema, don't have the overhead of a query language to interpret every file access command, didn't ensure that all file accesses be ACID compliant, etc. WinFS imposed all of those things and the associated overheads and much, much more every time you accessed anything.
- simonh 7y ago
  It was very slow and resource hungry, and also very time consuming to develop things on. Imagine if you were only allowed to write or run applications that ran on top of Oracle. Even if you try to write a program that works on text files, those text files are stored as blobs in an Oracle database.
  - regularfry 7y ago
    Isn't that the sort of problem you solve once, though? If you want a "this is just a stream of characters I can do POSIXy things to" interface, that's a library with fread(3) et al in the front, and a query for a single field in the database at the back.
  - skissane 7y ago
    > Even if you try to write a program that works on text files, those text files are stored as blobs in an Oracle database. Ever heard of Oracle Database Filesystem (DBFS)? https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/adlob/introducing-database-file-system.html https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/1...

echelon 7y ago

Does anyone have the story on why this project was actually halted? It reportedly sounded like it would have been a giant leap at the time, had it actually landed.

krylon 7y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1svf88/why_winfs_died_long/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1svf88/why_win...
- iso-8859-1 7y ago
  That discussion doesn't contain any high quality posts, why not link the actual article? http://hal2020.com/2013/02/14/winfs-integratedunified-storage-and-microsoft-part-1/ http://hal2020.com/2013/02/14/winfs-integratedunified-storag...
otabdeveloper4 7y ago
Probably because it was a dumb idea. There's no sense storing videos, baby photos and "quarterly report new (2) backup newest 08.2019_john.xlsx" in a database.
- BlackRing 7y ago
  If the filesystem itself was modeled after a database (which it can be argued it is, somewhat), it's not much of a stretch for WinFS to have been a thing. I was looking forward to seeing it in action based on reports of what it was.
  - simonh 7y ago
    File systems are databases in a small way. They use b-trees and such, but they don't enforce a rigorous global type system, don't enforce a table structure because everything has to have a schema, don't have the overhead of a query language to interpret every file access command, didn't ensure that all file accesses be ACID compliant, etc. WinFS imposed all of those things and the associated overheads and much, much more every time you accessed anything.
simonh 7y ago
It was very slow and resource hungry, and also very time consuming to develop things on. Imagine if you were only allowed to write or run applications that ran on top of Oracle. Even if you try to write a program that works on text files, those text files are stored as blobs in an Oracle database.
- regularfry 7y ago
  Isn't that the sort of problem you solve once, though? If you want a "this is just a stream of characters I can do POSIXy things to" interface, that's a library with fread(3) et al in the front, and a query for a single field in the database at the back.
- skissane 7y ago
  > Even if you try to write a program that works on text files, those text files are stored as blobs in an Oracle database. Ever heard of Oracle Database Filesystem (DBFS)? https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/adlob/introducing-database-file-system.html https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/1...