John over at inluminent was wondering about the proposed benefits of Longhorn and WinFS, the datastore that is slated to to replace filesystems, as we know them, with a database.
I’m skeptical of anything that abstracts away files and replaces them with SQL queries. That just seems like a potentially brittle solution.
If you just need to index and query some on-disk repository, try this: Nav4 Search Engine Patch Kit – Think Tank 23 Contextual Navigation Solutions.
If Googling your email is what you fancy, try Zoë. Runs everywhere Java does (OS X, Windows, linux, FreeBSD . . . ) and does more than I can explain here.
And in the time it takes for Longhorn to lurch into existence, even with the full understanding that bits and pieces will ship early, expect other solutions to emerge.