WinFS (short for Windows Future Storage) was the

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for a canceled data storage and

management Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a Government agency, government bodies through business administration, Nonprofit studies, nonprofit management, or the political s ...

system project based on

relational database A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

s, developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and first demonstrated in 2003. It was intended as an advanced storage subsystem for the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

, designed for

persistence Persistence or Persist may refer to: Math and computers * Image persistence, in LCD monitors * Persistence (computer science), the characteristic of data that outlives the execution of the program that created it * Persistence of a number, a ma ...

and management of

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, semi-structured and

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically plain text, text-heavy, but may contain data such ...

. WinFS includes a

for storage of information, and allows any type of information to be stored in it, provided there is a well defined

schema Schema may refer to: Science and technology * SCHEMA (bioinformatics), an algorithm used in protein engineering * Schema (genetic algorithms), a set of programs or bit strings that have some genotypic similarity * Schema.org, a web markup vocab ...

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, WinFS enables applications to understand the structure of all data and extract the information that they can use further. When WinFS was introduced at the 2003

Professional Developers Conference Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was a series of conferences for software developers; the conference was held infrequently to coincide with beta releases of the Microsoft Windows, Windows operating system, and showcased topic ...

, 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 Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

, but those plans were shelved in June 2006, with some of its component technologies being integrated into

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and

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft using Structured Query Language (SQL, often pronounced "sequel"). As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of ...

Motivation

Many filesystems found on common

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, including the

NTFS NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s. It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Tabl ...

filesystem which is used in modern versions of Microsoft Windows, store files and other objects only as a stream of bytes, and have little or no information about the data stored in the files. Such file systems also provide only a single way of organizing the files, namely via directories and file names. Because a file system has no knowledge about the data it stores, applications tend to use their own, often

proprietary {{Short pages monitor