An Opinion blog

An Opinion

Ok, I understand. So from the point of view of the WinFS it contains a pointer to an item stored within NTFS. What does the underlying NTFS stored binary data look like? Is it stored in folders on the disk? I suppose this means moving a file to another remote location will require copying the meta data and the underlying NTFS storage then. Not quite just replicating rows in a database which contain binary data as a column.

So does WinFS makes foldering obsolete? I envisioned a longhorn user seeing WinFS like a huge bucket of content which is grouped by meta data. This would include things like the windows directory, program files etc. The would no longer care about folders, directories and drive letters.

Shawn Smith

Thought you'd like to know, something in your html formatting prevents your text from wrapping properly when viewed using Mozilla.

For example, at normal text size, all but the last word of this paragraph continues on one line, resulting in a page width around 400% the size of the browser window:

"In a comment to my explanation of WinFS, Shawn Smith wonders why we would not store all the data (including the file) in the database. In fact we are. The file storage itself is managed by the database engine. In the relational schema, there is a column with a binary type and an attribute that tells the system to store the data in a file in NTFS. Transactions are coordinated between the database and NTFS to maintain consistency. The advantage you get over just a normal binary column is that you can ask the system for a special UNC path that can be used to open the file for I/O, leveraging all the performance of NTFS. It really is the best of both worlds."

Certainly not the "best of both worlds" as far as browsers are concerned. :)

Frank

hgh

hgh