4 ms·

The problem with Database-as-a-File System is people are really asking for The-One-Unified schema. The problem with The-One-Unified schema is it anticipates al

The problem with Database-as-a-File System is people are really asking for The-One-Unified schema. The problem with The-One-Unified schema is it anticipates all future requirements which is impossible. At best you can add a few more structured primitives, but that's not much better than SQL-lite or whatever you prefer running on top of a block store, since you don't know or really care about the domain of every application.

optimiz3 12y ago
Also - Cairo/WinFS failed because their requirements were not achievable, and there was no real market demand for them. Just like natural language input for the general market (no one outside of very specific niches actually wants to interact with a computer using voice). What value would a "filesytem" that understands contacts add to a web-server or load balancer? All it does is couple application-specific domains and complexity into layers of the system where they don't belong. No one is debating that it would be nice for all computers to have a unified understanding of what a document and what a contact is, but those are orthogonal requirements to what a filesystem needs to do.
frik 12y ago
Microsoft SharePoint does everything of WinFS, it acts as WinFS like file-server for office documents. It comes with default schema (columns) and the administrator can add specific company relevant metadata fields. You can group, filter search, create custom views based on metadata. It all works great, but in the end of the day it's just a website and managing more than one file at a time is cumbersome (it's a website not Explorer/shell) and even if one can open directories in Explorer using inbuilt WebDAV protocol the WebDAV integration is ok but it is as featureless as the zip-file support in Windows shell (no rightclick menu entries, no new file, etc.). With a native OS integration other applications could take advantage of the new possible features.

optimiz3 12y ago

Also - Cairo/WinFS failed because their requirements were not achievable, and there was no real market demand for them. Just like natural language input for the general market (no one outside of very specific niches actually wants to interact with a computer using voice). What value would a "filesytem" that understands contacts add to a web-server or load balancer? All it does is couple application-specific domains and complexity into layers of the system where they don't belong. No one is debating that it would be nice for all computers to have a unified understanding of what a document and what a contact is, but those are orthogonal requirements to what a filesystem needs to do.

frik 12y ago

Microsoft SharePoint does everything of WinFS, it acts as WinFS like file-server for office documents. It comes with default schema (columns) and the administrator can add specific company relevant metadata fields. You can group, filter search, create custom views based on metadata. It all works great, but in the end of the day it's just a website and managing more than one file at a time is cumbersome (it's a website not Explorer/shell) and even if one can open directories in Explorer using inbuilt WebDAV protocol the WebDAV integration is ok but it is as featureless as the zip-file support in Windows shell (no rightclick menu entries, no new file, etc.). With a native OS integration other applications could take advantage of the new possible features.