Minh WOOH! WOOH!

Sep 08, 2005 at 8:18 AM

Jon Udell's take on WinFS and social information management

Article wrote:

The intervening years have also shifted our focus from the PC to the network and from personal to social computing. Most of the documents, contacts, and messages that I need to find and organize live primarily in the network. This gives me convenient access from anywhere and connects my stuff to other people’s stuff.

I've been looking for a use, besides cataloging life events, for WinFS. With self-describing data, this could be a very interesting use in a couple of years.
Carlos Luna

Sep 08, 2005 at 8:22 AM

I totally agree. The fact that information is now relational can open a broad of software inovation in a near future. We will see more interaction between softwares just because of relational data
blowdart Peek-a-boo

Sep 08, 2005 at 8:32 AM

The fun comes in querying all this.

Despite meta data I can see massive problems in using SQL to query a file system. Underneath it all, inside files, it may not be structed data. Reisers written a lot on this, but I'll be damned if I can find it!
Tom Servo W-hat?

Sep 08, 2005 at 8:56 AM

That's why you're supposed to write item schemas to make sure things get stored structured in the SQL database to begin with, and write file promoters that make sure the relevant unstructured data gets synced and stored into verbose structured tables where possible, too.
blowdart Peek-a-boo

Sep 08, 2005 at 9:00 AM

Tom Servo wrote:

That's why you're supposed to write item schemas to make sure things get stored structured in the SQL database to begin with, and write file promoters that make sure the relevant unstructured data gets synced and stored into verbose structured tables where possible, too.

I realise that, but I have a big problem with the idea of unstructed data being stored in structured tables, I feel it's unrealistic.

Taking the file system as an example (and I realise WinFS is just a file system). We've had a semi structred concept of directories, and files. We've had meta data in office documents. But really, how many people search via those? Desktop searchs are so popular because they work with unstructed data inside the files. People don't remember filenames, directory names of meta data, they remember the contents of what they typed.
jsrfc58

Sep 08, 2005 at 9:01 AM

blowdart wrote:

The fun comes in querying all this.

Despite meta data I can see massive problems in using SQL to query a file system. Underneath it all, inside files, it may not be structed data.

...and layer upon layer of abstraction. If you don't put the metadata at the lowest levels, in seperate tables, and make it quickly accessible, I can see where querying 100,000 files is going to run pretty slow.

Just ask the virus scan software makers.

I can only imagine what will happen if you try to query across a sizeable network or even multiple PCs (if that's permissable).

blowdart wrote:

Reisers written a lot on this, but I'll be damned if I can find it!

Do you mean this info?

ReiserFS Articles
blowdart Peek-a-boo

Sep 08, 2005 at 9:06 AM

jsrfc58 wrote:

blowdart wrote:Reisers written a lot on this, but I'll be damned if I can find it!

Do you mean this info?

ReiserFS Articles

He had a specific one about using a structured query language on unstructured data, linked to from slashdot, and I've lost the URL
Tom Servo W-hat?

Sep 08, 2005 at 11:48 AM

jsrfc58 wrote:

If you don't put the metadata at the lowest levels, in seperate tables, and make it quickly accessible, I can see where querying 100,000 files is going to run pretty slow.

That's what the file promoters do. They come with specific schemas, too, that are tailored to store as much metadata as possible in a table in WinFS itself. When the underlying filestream (a.k.a. unstructured data) is changed, it'll resync that data, same in the other direction.
samdruk samdruk

Sep 29, 2005 at 11:54 PM

Tom's got it right. We don't need to grovel through thousands of streams looking for data when we get a query over the steams. We've already got the metadata stored in proper tables inside the engine alongside the data from native items.

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WinFS and Social Information Management

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