WinFS and the ReiserFS filesystem...

There are more filesystems that go (or already are) into the same direction as WinFS: have a look at the ReiserFS at http://www.namesys.com.

Oke, it is for Linux, but an interesting read.. and of course really interesting for all the people out there running on Linux.

Note: Especially the "Future vision" document is interesting when comparing to WinFS.

See also: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=The_Secret_World_of_ReiserFS&story_id=23157&category=databases

2 Comments

  • I don't think you can compare WinFS to a file system. WinFS runs on top of one (NTFS), it's not really a file system per se, it's more like a glorified indexing service on top of the underlying file system.



    I still don't understand what the big deal with WinFS is, it will be unsuable unless everybody starts to create useful metadata with their files, which is something I just can't see happening. NTFS allows for metadata and alternate streams since the begining (1993? maybe even earlier) yet nobody uses those features.

  • I think it is unfair to say that it can't or can be compared at this point, where the transistion from NTFS to NTFS+SQL has not even been completed, as far as it goes that eventually NTFS will be replaced all together by the NTFS+SQL transistion which should imply that there will be a WinFS 2.0 that could be comparable. Regardlessly, I think the news article was rather insightful and made some good points, despite the double speak. However, I don't belive that SQL server falls victim to any allegeded unnessecary data locks, considering it has been proven to scale accross large data centers and multiple cpus even since early versions. By now it should be more granular, and should be a step closer to being as fine tuned as a file system is required to be.

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