The
WinFS team have announced that their product will effectively be absorbed into .NET 3.0 and into Katmai (the next version of SQL Server). WinFS is no longer slated for a separate release as a post-Vista enhancement. It looks like this means WinFS is no longer going to deliver on its original promise - seamless access to all types of data content through the file system - but that kind of functionality will go elsewhere instead.
What this apparently means for SQL Server is that we are promised support for new types of data within the database (what they refer to as "unstructured data"). Also, SQL Server is to inherit some automated administration features that have been developed by the WinFS team. Both those things are consistent with the idea of SQL Server as a pervasive
platform for data storage and access - something that was trailed at the same time SQL Server Everywhere was announced earlier this year.
Support for more "exotic" types of data (multimedia or HTML for example) is sometimes referred to by Microsoft and others as "non-relational data" - a phrase which is not only technically inaccurate but it also seems to me misses the important point. There is nothing in principle that restricts the types of data that a relational database can store*. Instead the critical feature is that the DBMS also support the ability to manipulate and expose data in ways that are most useful to the user - for example by delivering a web page or streaming some media content. Again, there's no fundamental reason why an RDBMS shouldn't do that, it's just that DBMS vendors have historically put the emphasis on the lowest common denominator - the basic set of datatypes inherited from the early SQL standards.
Some obvious examples of rich data support would be the ability to search HTML documents intelligently, perform smart text searches or access emails based on their metadata. Ideally those data access methods need to be extensible - something already possible today in SQL Server with its support for user-defined types and CLR code in the database. Microsoft is clearly well positioned to provide this kind of data access because apart from the data store they also own so much of the technology stack for delivering richer content: the server and desktop OS, the web server, the media player, email server, etc.
So the WinFS announcement may mean good news for SQL Server - I look forward hearing more about the new features. Just don't tell me it's not relational data!
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[* I do often prefer to distinguish between Relational DBMSs and SQL DBMSs. They are not the same thing - not by a long shot. Even so, it's hard to avoid using the word "relational" informally to describe SQL because there is no more concise term for what we would otherwise have to call "the SQL data model and SQL language" - that's what Microsoft really mean when they say "relational". In this instance, when I say "relational" I mean both the SQL model and the relational one.]