The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
Summary: Here's a Windows 8 feature about which I haven't heard before: A possible new file system known as "Protogon."
Windows enthusiast Sandro Villinger has a nice summary of some of the known and unknown Windows 8 features that various folks have discovered since internal "milestone" builds began leaking over the past couple of months.
Villinger makes a passing mention of something I hadn't heard of in his Windows 8 Top 10: Something named (or codenamed) "Protogon."
From his May 31 IT World article:
"I've also dug up traces of some underlying file system changes that I couldn't quite make sense of, such as an entirely new file system driver called "NT Protogon FS driver", which looks like a kernel mode driver for some sort of (yet unknown) file system called Protogon. It's unclear, whether this is a major new file system or just some minor subsystem."
I asked Rafael Rivera of "WithinWindows" fame as to whether he'd heard of Protogon. He did a quick check and said that whatever Protogon is, it seems to incorporate database-like concepts like transactions, cursors, rows and tables. He said it includes a string, which seems to indicate Protogon could replace or at least emulate NTFS (the NT file system) as needed. Rivera also wondered if Protogon might be an update of the "Jet Blue" file system/extensible storage engine adapted for the latest version of Active Directory and Exchange Server.
There were a lot of rumors early on about Windows 8, including that it might have a brand-new file system. Now I'm wondering what this thing really is. WinFS revisited? (WinFS was a new storage engine that was supposed to be part of Windows Vista, but which was largely shelved, save some concepts that went to the SQL team.)
I doubt we'll hear anything about Protogon during Windows Chief Steven Sinofsky's appearance at the AllThingsD conference on Wednesday. (Sinofsky may show off the Windows 8 interface for tablets, according to rumors and reports.)
Windows 8 is expected to be released to manufacturing in 2012 (in spite of any/all official retractions you may read about).
Anyone have any guesses (educated or not) about Protogon?
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Talkback
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
XFS? Oh, my god! If you are right it is better to have a cluster bomb drop on your house- it will be less damage.
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
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RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
" I think this system is based on XAM and XFS; content aware storage."
Hmmm...using Windows 7 professional would give the available downloadable packet to search within a Windows Server 2008. So, this 'Protogon' file system may make content placement given to the end user without location priorities.
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
I'd expect that any future filesystem from MS would bring together some of the aspects of metadata storage and retrieval along with things like logical volume management which should make up for the loss of dynamic volume management in Windows Home Server.
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
SQL is a VERY powerful, fairly well standardized data manipulation language.
Object Orientation and RDBMS do not fit well together for good reason - they're orthogonal constructs designed to solve different problems.
I think...
...PriMinister is talking about T-SQL, not the structure of SQL Server databases themselves. I agree with him, T-SQL needs some serious revision, starting with the elimination of concatenation of statements by ; which is the source of *a lot* of SQL injection attacks.
Eliminating the promiscuous whitespace wrapping of statements wouldn't hurt either!
Finally, T-SQL is far too COBOL-like for my taste.
Other than that, I agree with bitcrazed, SQL itself is a well understood domain and very powerful. It's just the T-SQL extensions that suck.
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
concatenated sql statements are a function of poor programming practices, not poor design from a T-SQL standpoint. Object oriented syntax, instantiating collections of objects in memory, is really not what a database is about and would be (IMO) performance prohibitive. T-SQL in recent revision have incorporated some object oriented features such as custom data types, table types and table valued parameters.
I'm also not sure what he means
Since SQL Server 2008+ can store ANY data, much like a file system, I'm not sure it really needs an overhaul.
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
I think something has to be announced or advertised before it can really be called Vapourware. Hints in a leaked build hardly counts.
RE: The mystery of Windows 8's new 'Protogon' file system
Your software isn't a working product until it becomes vaporware first.
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