[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Microsoft has been interested in a relational file system since the Cairo Days.

http://www.zdnet.com/bill-gates-bigg...fs-7000011136/

They revisited the technology during Longhorn and more recently. The verdict, so far, is that the hardware (especially hard drives) is not there yet. (It didn't help that the project management was a tad...confused...)

The links accorded with my memories of the period.

Especially the note from an MS staffer in the process that if you asked any three members of the WinFS effort, you would get three different answers as to just what it was. If you can't clearly define what problem you are addressing, it's no surprise if you don't get a solution out the door.

But with SSDs evolving, the day is coming. It will be very useful as they roll out more of their natural language technologies into production. But the efforts they put into the work were not wasted: the Cairo era work fed into Exchange Server and the Longhorn effort fed into Sharepoint, two tidy little billion-dollar businesses in their own right.

Well, SSDs certainly provide access an order of magnitude faster, though I don't expect to see the full effects till costs drop further, and we see new underlying storage media that aren't subject to the limits on writes that current NAND flash is.

But the underlying idea isn't exactly new. A database I used to deal with under Unix offered best performance if the data store was placed on a "raw" partition. It did its own low-level disk access and got performance gains by bypassing the OS file system. Of course, that was in the days of things like MFM drives, and drive performance has improved to the point where the impulse that drove the approach isn't as pressing.

(I just went to an SSD for OS and programs on the current desktop, and spent some effort setting stuff up to minimize writes, with the intent that the SSD hold programs an OS and be primarily read from, but most frequently updated data would be on a standard HD. But it's wonderfully fast. Being able to boot to a Win7 desktop in 30 seconds, or a Ubuntu Login screen in 20 is a refreshing experience.)

Oh, and over at ZDNET they think the real revolution in Windows 10 is in how MS has evolved their workflow to produce and maintain it. There is a reason they are saying it will be the "last" version of Windows.

They certainly needed to revamp their workflow. Everything I heard about the Windows code base and development process, and the number of different folks who got to pee in the design soup, reminded me a bit of Hollywood and movie production: it's a miracle anything got out the door at all, and a double miracle if it was good.

The focus on the Enterprise customer is also a requirement. I've been part of company-wide Windows upgrades. They are complex and expensive, and addressed because the company doesn't have a choice, and has to upgrade to continue.

This reluctance affects the rate at which Windows upgrades take place. A new Windows version might have things of value, but the perceived pain of making the change outweighs the gains to be achieved, and the enterprise stays put.

The model MS seems to be moving toward looks a bit like what I see with Ubuntu Linux: a continuing stream of updates pushed to the machine, with a reboot only when something like a new Linux kernel requires it.

MS also seems to be moving to a more modular design, where CIOs can pick just what parts they want to upgrade as defined by their business needs, and not have to get everything in a new release.

I expect future Windows versions to be identified in terms of milestones achieved and bundles of features offered, but not tied to version numbers, and not happening all at once for all concerned. That's the development model in an increasing number of areas. I run Firefox, and Firefox went to a rapid release model a while back where there is a new major version every three months. I use Nightly, which will be Firefox 35 down the road, but for some time I've had to look at Help: About to know just which version I am running.
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Dennis