Seems to me this article is simply a rehash of all the problems the BeOS guys had when creating their DB file system. Not once do they actually say they have any information about how Microsoft is going to implement their system. They just guess a lot.
I remember when Microsoft first started working on SQL Server 7.0. Everybody was saying that the expertise required to make a good database server was beyond Microsoft, and that SQL Server 6.5 (which was largely bought, built upon, and had very little Microsoft original code) was not exactly a good starting point.
Microsoft agreed, and completely rewrote SQL Server 7 from the ground up. As it turned out, it wasn't too shabby at all - certainly not for a first try. SQL Server 2000 eventually arrived, and was so good that in non-clustered environments, it is now almost always the best possible choice! Better than DB2! Better than Oracle! Wow!
Now I hear Oracle proponents saying that it took Oracle 10+ years of hard work to make a truly scalable (horizontally, not vertically - which SQL Server already does better than Oracle) database server, and so everybody should ignore Microsoft on the database front for at least another 7 or 8 years if you need clustering.
Well, I predict that the version of SQL Server after Yukon will have the same (and probably better) clustering abilities as Oracle. What do I base this on? Well, complete speculation... I'm trying to use the past to predict the future. At any rate, Oracle has been mostly stagnant over the past several years, so let's "hope" it's not a case of the tortoise and the hare. After all, I love paying 20x more for Oracle.
What does all of this have to do with a database file system? Well, the Be guys seem to think that their approach was the only viable one. It may be. It or may not. They have no idea what Microsoft is doing, and that's what it comes down to. The only thing we really have to build an argument upon (right now anyway) is the past, and Microsoft has succeed in these kinds of unlikely endeavors before... I say they will do it again. :-)
This post was edited by RMD on Sunday, March 31, 2002 at 16:49.
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