>
> So it seems they are using SQL Server as some sort of massive storage,
> which utilises metadata attached to each 'file'/Record to perform
> searches, as well as for inserting, deleting,updating.
No big deal. Search for "alternate data streams" and you will see that NTFS already has a facility for metadata storage. It works differently, but metadata is everywhere.
What is a big deal is the other database like facilities. Transactionality, especially atomicity, is really a big deal for filesystems. Filesystems get corrupted all the time in crashes, and even though current filesystems prevent single file corruptions, there are frequent multi-file inconsistencies. But if you take a look at the design documents of ReiserFS 4 (sponsored by IBM and released last week) you will see that some transactionality aspects are already implemented in filesystems that are currently available.
> I'm wondering
> though how slow the OS will be with legacy applications (oh
> gods...everything we run now will be a 'legacy' app) since there would
> have to be an abstraction layer in between to translate old file system
> calls to the new WINFS format.
There won't be. The old FS calls will be implemented the old way, you really have to use neww calls to use the new features. But I will gladly take a 30% filesystem performance hit to have a transactional filesystem.
BTW, IIRC GNOME has an alpha version of something similar build on top of PostgreSQL.
Jochem
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