Microsoft: Yukon, WinFS Should Tame Storage, Search Woes

In addition to previously reported perks, such as built-in reporting services and better exception reporting, the next-generation database, will also sport data mirroring, cross-domain queries and improved debugging. "You can combine relational and XML queries in one," said Gordon Mangione, Microsoft's SQL Server vice president at the company's Professional Developers Conference, in Los Angeles.

Key to Yukon's promised richness is the WinFS file system that will be part and parcel of Longhorn, Microsoft executives said. In theory, WinFS will store all data types and make them easily searchable and accessible.

That is no mean feat. Mangione cited a new University of California, Berkeley study showing disk storage tripling in size every 18 months.

"Heaven help us if 'find first, find next' is how we have to find things [in the future]," Mangione said.

Tom Rizzo, Microsoft SQL Server product manager, demonstrated how with WinFS and Yukon a user can search massive amounts of data and filter on the results via a sort view. WinFS also creates logical connections between related files and documents, Microsoft has said.

"You could do all this by content-indexing atop all your applications, but that's hard to build applications atop that," Mangione said.

It was unclear, however, what has to happen at the application level to enable these searches. In the past, users have been asked to input tags on Word documents, for example, but few ever do it. "Ideally, if the apps are written right, users will not have to do anything" to make their files searchable via WinFS, said Stan Sorensen, director of product management for Microsoft SQL Server.

Rizzo also demonstrated a nascent natural-language search capability and Yukon's tight integration with Whidbey, the next release of SQL Server. Chief among Yukon's promised perks is its support of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which would enable developers to program database functions and applications in languages other than SQL.

Mangione's call to the thousands of developers convened at the Los Angeles Convention Center was to start using the early Yukon beta, distributed here, "and start pounding on it. Kick the tires of WinFS."

Earlier in the day, Eric Rudder, senior vice president of Servers and Tools, said Yukon remains on track to ship next year.