WinFS – so long, far well, enjoy your new position

WinFS finally left the Windows stable (here, here) over the last few days for residence in a SQL Server existence. Being the insightful watcher of the industry that I am ,  I had just finished the preparation for a presentation I was going to deliver to some colleagues on the subject – now cancelled.

It’s not a surprise, but it is a disappointment.

Anyone who architects or manages a large scale file service knows that they are nearly always in complete anarchy and causing all sorts of problems at every tier in the business. There are compliance people all over the world who are losing hours of sleep every time they think about the file system because they have no idea what is stored there or how incriminating it could be. There are IT managers who would rather do anything other than be buying yet more disks. There are business continuity people who are praying that the feared fire in the computer room never happens, because they know that they have no chance of getting all that data back to where it should be. There are thousands and millions of end users who fear having to try to find a valuable needle among the haystack that is before them.

A number of people have proposed answers. These have normally required the syphoning of data off into another store or application. These additional stores have normally resulted in the data being available in more than one store, rather than the data moving into a the new store, if it got their at all. This hasn’t resolved the problem, it’s just made it worse.

WinFS, had the chance, however slim, of changing this for good. It had the chance to put the business back in control of the data while, at the same time, giving extra functionality to the end user. But alas it was not to be.

The move of the WinFS development work into SQL Server means that it will always be separate from the file service and will be met with the same level of adoption as Oracle iFS. As a Windows function the level of adoption might have been something significantly different, but I can’t see it having anything like the same impact as a SQL Server function.

I don’t think the Web has yet answered this question either.

Tags: WinFS,File System