I have been following the PDC event and information
outflows with very keen interest. The newly published document from
Microsoft re. WinFS is certainly interesting reading, especially as
it articulates a vision that validates our Virtuoso universal server
(as far as data storage goes). The excerpt below pretty much sums
this up:
Every year, as new hard disks get bigger and faster,
applications catch up by producing more data. Hard disks are
commonly used to store personal information: correspondence,
personal contacts, and work documents. These items are currently
treated as separate entities, yet they are interrelated on some
level; and it's no surprise that e-mail comes from your personal
contacts list and influences the work that you should be doing and
hence determines the documents that you'll create. When you have a
large number of items, it is important to have a flexible and
efficient mechanism to search for particular items based on their
properties and content. Up until now, storage mechanisms like
Outlook