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Windows on a database - sliced and diced by BeOS vets
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 29/03/2002 at 21:16 GMT


After we wrote about Microsoft's plans to put a database into each copy of Windows as the native file store back in January, we were delighted to hear from two system architects for whom this news was really old hat.

You see, it's been done before. Benoit Schillings was one of Be Inc's first employees, and authored the original user space database server. This was later superseded by a more conventional approach: BFS, a fast, 64bit journaled file system written by Dominic Giampaolo, which had many database-like properties.

Between them they have more practical experience in making such an ambitious scheme work on a PC than anyone else. So last month we reunited Benoit and Dominic at Menlo Park's Applewood Pizza for reminiscences about Be, and some low-down on file systems and databases.

(Applewood was an unconsciously appropriate choice - Benoit was a Mac developer before joining Be Inc, and is now chief engineer at OpenWave; while Dominic, we are delighted to learn, has subsequently joined Apple as a file system engineer. He started last week).

Now normally we give you the he-said, she-said quotes padded, but this conversation flowed so sweetly anything other than a transcript.

And although there's plenty of nitty gritty implementation stuff discussed here, it never strays far from the u