Despite some potential blemishes, Longhorn’s WinFS looks attractive

From now on, I want no more reader e-mails accusing me of taking a Microsoft payoff. Here I am, publicly writing about the loss of my beloved Cherokee, and do I hear word one from the company? Does a FedEx box from Redmond arrive with a bag of cash inside marked “For Oliver’s Car”? Do I come home to find a new Jeep with a big bow and a Microsoft logo sitting in my driveway? Hell, no! So now I’m a perceived Microsoft bigot — and penniless in the bargain. What a way to start the year.

One positive side effect of my recent automotive malaise, however, is an increase in reader feedback. Unfortunately, much of it was from people who were only marginally happy that I wasn’t killed, but were positively thrilled that another gas guzzling SUV had departed this earth. So allow me to lay that issue to rest: The SUV is a work requirement, not a grocery-shopping, soccer-mom tank. You can’t haul around three servers, two workstations, and a firewall in a Prius — or a sliding chop saw for that matter. So don’t hate me, but the company is leasing me a “compact SUV” to replace the Cherokee — meaning it packs a whopping six cylinders.

Seems that everything you really want sits tantalizingly on the horizon. For example, Toyota teased me with its announcement of a hybrid Highlander, but it turns out that won’t be available until 2005. And getting back to Microsoft, the company not only ignored my financial pain, but it’s teasing me with WinFS. Another 2005 arrival, WinFS is Longhorn’s reputed file system. Think NTFS with a storage management layer, which would be extremely handy for some of my paper-heavy and file-locating-challenged clients.

WinFS is embodied in a database that rides on top of NTFS. What makes WinFS attractive is that it comes with its own API, aptly dubbed the WinFX API, which will allow developers to write applications to take advantage of WinFS. Microsoft has already suggested a number of ways that WinFS will make our lives better, but the one with the most doozie potential is natural-language query.

Instead of worrying about file names or even specific locations, WinFS will supposedly take a query such as “Find me all the pictures of Oliver’s wrecked Jeep taken in December of 2003.” This should bring up every image file associated with my car as long as WinFS has some way to track that, either by file name or folder location. Given the way most natural queries work nowadays, I expect to see several thumbnails of Playboy centerfolds in response to this query. But let’s wait and see Longhorn before I start actually trashing it.

WinFS sounds attractive because it gives me storage management embedded in the operating system. But Microsoft will have several hurdles to overcome to make this work. Existing storage-management applications, for example, will need to be incorporated. Redmond has enough of an upgrade struggle as it is without telling folks who purchased storage management that they need to upgrade it in addition to their server OS. And I get the distinct feeling that this is also going to require some significant attention from backup software makers. Veritas will need to incorporate database-capable backup into its base license in addition to its specific database agents. The system will need to verify not only that the database and the file system were backed up, but that they’re still in proper sync.

And last there’s performance. You guys are worried that I’ll be driving a six-cylinder 4×4. I’m worried that Microsoft expects me to sell a SATA NAS to all my clients a year from now because WinFS is too bulky for straight SCSI. Then again, if that’s the case, at least I’ll have a car big enough to haul those jobs around.