Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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/1...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1svf88/why_win...

That discussion doesn't contain any high quality posts, why not link the actual article?

http://hal2020.com/2013/02/14/winfs-integratedunified-storag...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com