I think I interviewed with that team (or tried to at least) - it had great concepts, but the limited leadership I met on that one seemed unlikely to actually get to product (I say with 20 years retrospection) - they were stuck on sql when it needed a directory, but the directory couldn't scale to handle filesystems. Both have since been fixed, but I think the idea is well dead in MS
I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I'm a bit sad that the project didn't go anywhere forever and then was cancelled. They had some pretty ambitious and interesting ideas for it.
E.g. the only public beta of Vista that had it enabled used the database as a backing store for Outlook contacts. Each contact was an object in the database. So were photos. And you could link - as I recall, I only read about it back then - people to photos. And then search on that data, of course. Like, "give me all emails, documents, and photos that have to do with person X, from 2022-2023".
But IIRC, the performance was atrocious. They might have been able to fix that, but instead it ended on the junk heap of unrealized ideas.
I remember those Longhorn betas - yes, it was coming apart under feature creep, but that only gave us more to play with and anticipate in the leaks.
A shame that MS is no longer in the mindset of ambition like this. Instead we get adverts and clickbait in the Start Menu, and the worst filesystem search on any OS I've experienced.
I feel like I need to inform you that the people doing the “recommendations” in the Windows start menu are not the same people who write filesystems.
The venn diagram of those two sets of people is two non-touching, non-intersecting circles.
There are interesting things going on, I’m sure, but we won’t see any of it until this AI baloney is behind us.
Nerds create a virtual moron that gets a large percentage of stuff wrong and execs demand that it be inserted into every product made immediately. An absolute genius move only an MBA can explain.
Sure, but that indicates institutional rot. If the people who write NTFS drivers (i.e. its devs who love Windows the most) can't push back on user hostility and short-sighted decisions are made constantly then we have a company that has drifted far from its strengths. It is just coasting on brand recognition. This is the kind of trend that is seldom reversed.
Which was essentially SQL Server as a filesystem.
Project was ultimately cancelled.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS