Microsoft and future OSs - Cairo comes home

 

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Posted on 9 Aug 2001 at 15:08

Drive M:

You might think that this is the end of the story, but I think Microsoft has planned wider and more profound changes. "Drive M:" in Exchange Server 2000 allows you to mount the storage engine as a drive letter on the server, and to drill into it just as if it was file system storage. You can go into the tree, and share your mailbox at the filesystem level, complete with all the normal access and security facilities. This works by having a driver that plugs into the top of the JET/ESE storage engine, which then plugs into the bottom of the Windows 2000 driver stack.

Drive M: is a profoundly important technology to Microsoft. Today, it offers an extremely powerful replicating filesystem, which runs between your Exchange 2000 servers. Put some data into the London office server, and it will appear in the New York server automatically, with your system administrators controlling the replication schedules and rules. It allows you to publish straight out via IIS 5.0 - just one mouse click is required to turn a Public Folder into a Web site for intranet, extranet or Internet use. And it has extra document management facilities over and above those found in NTFS.

In the mid betas of Windows 2000, we saw a service called NSS (Native Storage Services) that allowed Office documents to be decomposed into NTFS Streams and thus stored in the NTFS file system more efficiently. NSS disappeared in late betas, and was promised to return in XP - it hasn't done so. At the time, the reason for the removal of NSS was because the HFS (Hierarchical Filing System) capabilities of Windows 2000 clashed with NSS - HFS worked at the whole file level, whereas the raison d' - tre of NSS was to work at the sub-file level.

The fact that NSS is still "missing in action", coupled to the work done on Drive M:, its associated indexing capabilities and the first-cut work done on "Tahoe", now makes it clear that Microsoft is doing no more real work on the NTFS file system.

Because of this, I think Microsoft is going to pull a major switch in "Blackcomb", the release of Windows XP due in 2004/5. Yukon will be out, and stable, and Kodiak will be sitting on top of Yukon's store. Active Directory will be in Yukon storage too. Drive M: will still be of great importance to corporate users.

SQL Server central

At this point, Microsoft turns the whole NTFS/SQL Server model on its head. Instead of SQL Server using storage file space provided by NTFS, SQL Server itself becomes the base storage engine, and NTFS becomes an API-compatible driver into the store - just like Drive M: today. In other words, the machine boots SQL Server and NTFS is an old compatibility API for those applications that still need to manipulate "files" through a filing system API.

This is perfectly possible to do. With the final killing-off of real-mode and 16-bit code with the death of Windows 98/ME and the arrival of Windows XP, Microsoft can have any size of bootstrap loader it likes. There is no need for the native store to be NTFS - it could just as easily be SQL Server that starts as the native store, with the NTFS driver coming in as a service. For desktop and laptop users, they might call it MSDE, as in the present lightweight SQL Server for those machines.

The changes this will bring will be profound. By having everything within one store, it will be possible to treat all data as is it was one data type - all queries can be "in process", and thus much faster than today's inefficient mish-mash of queries that spread across a wide number of stores. The performance of servers and desktops in 2005 will be dramatically higher than today, especially in the 64-bit world. So issuing huge queries against a uniform store will be entirely possible. From the users perspective, nothing could be simpler - "find me stuff to do with project X, where the management team includes Fred and Emily" is not fanciful at all - after all, English Query is now a robust technology in the SQL Server product group.