Re: Things that Longhorn seems to be doing right

Theodore Ts'o
2003-10-30T01:52:23Z

Keep in mind that just because Windows does thing a certain way
doesn't mean we have to provide the same functionality in exactly the
same way.

Also keep in mind that Microsoft very deliberately blurs what they do
in their "kernel" versus what they provide via system libraries (i.e.,
API's provided via their DLL's, or shared libraries).

At some level what they have done can be very easily replicated by
having a userspace database which is tied to the filesystem so you can
do select statements to search on metadata assocated with files. We
can do this simply by associating UUID's to files, and storing the
file metadata in a MySQL database which can be searched via
appropriate userspace libraries which we provide.

Please do **not** assume that just because of the vaporware press
releases released by Microsoft that (a) they have pushed an SQL Query
optimizer into the kernel, or that (b) even if they did, we should
follow their bad example and attempt to do the same.

There are multiple ways of skinning this particular cat, and we don't
need to blindly follow Microsoft's design mistakes.

Fortunately, I have enough faith in Linus Torvalds' taste that I'm not
particularly worried what would happen if someone were to send him a
patch that attempted to cram MySQL or Postgres into the guts of the
Linux kernel.... although I would like to watch when someone proposes
such a thing!

- Ted