WinFS

WinFS (short for Windows Future Storage) is the code name for a cancelled data storage and management system project based on relational databases, developed by Microsoft and first demonstrated in 2003 as an advanced storage subsystem for the Microsoft Windows operating system, designed for persistence and management of structured, semi-structured as well as unstructured data.

WinFS includes a relational database for storage of information, and allows any type of information to be stored in it, provided there is a well defined schema for the type. Individual data items could then be related together by relationships, which are either inferred by the system based on certain attributes or explicitly stated by the user. As the data has a well defined schema, any application can reuse the data; and using the relationships, related data can be effectively organized as well as retrieved. Because the system knows the structure and intent of the information, it can be used to make complex queries that enable advanced searching through the data and aggregating various data items by exploiting the relationships between them.

While WinFS and its shared type schema make it possible for an application to recognize the different data types, the application still has to be coded to render the different data types. Consequently, it would not allow development of a single application that can view or edit all data types; rather what WinFS enables applications to understand is the structure of all data and extract the information that it can use further. When WinFS was introduced at the 2003 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft also released a video presentation, named IWish, showing mockup interfaces that showed how applications would expose interfaces that take advantage of a unified type system. The concepts shown in the video ranged from applications using the relationships of items to dynamically offer filtering options to applications grouping multiple related data types and rendering them in a unified presentation.

WinFS was billed as one of the pillars of the "Longhorn" wave of technologies, and would ship as part of the next version of Windows. It was subsequently decided that WinFS would ship after the release of Windows Vista, but those plans were shelved in June 2006, with some of its component technologies being integrated into upcoming releases of ADO.NET and Microsoft SQL Server. While it was then assumed by observers that WinFS was finished as a project, in November 2006 Steve Ballmer announced that WinFS was still in development, though it was not clear how the technology was to be delivered. Several components of the last Integrated Storage Initiative project, Microsoft Semantic Engine, presented at Microsoft PDC 2009, have been integrated back into the SQL Server "Denali". At the 2010 SQL Server PASS Community Summit, the forthcoming version of SQL Server ("Denali") was shown, which seems to incorporate many of the WinFS ideas.