Quite amazed about Longhorns new transactional file-system I found in PDC2003 Sessions two very interesting presentations – read them with current RDBMS (Oracle or likley) in mind..

Transactional Programming on the Windows Platform

See how "Whidbey" and "Longhorn" provide significant new functionality for writing transactional applications, including a new managed framework (System.Transactions) that makes transactions accessible to any CLR-based language. Learn how this framework is available to all "Whidbey" and "Longhorn" applications and includes several facilities to simply developing transactional resource managers. Take a look at the new transaction managers that are available including the Lightweight Transaction Manager (LTM) and the Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM)-both of which offer considerably better performance in many common scenarios. Learn how System.Transactions integrates with SQL Server, the file system, WS-Transactions, and "Indigo."

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Transaction Support Under the Covers: KTM, WinLS and Transactional NTFS

Hate writing error-handling code? Detest writing the error handling code for your error handling code even more? What you need are transactions just abort that failed operation and rejoice in higher code coverage numbers as the transactional resource managers rollback all those incomplete actions assuming all the places you store state support transactions. See how Windows "Longhorn" helps developers by providing transactions as a fundamental part of the OS supporting full ACID transactional support for local (NTFS) and remote (SMB) file shares, and allowing these transactions to be coordinated by DTC and involve other resource managers such as SQL, COM+ and WinFS. See how, for advanced developers building systems with transactional behavior, Windows "Longhorn" offers a transaction manager and common log service accessible by kernel, Win32 and .NET/LAPI api sets and learn how they ease the complex work involved in this class of application.

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Amazing: Transaction Support for all NTFS file operations

• Full Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability
• Allow an arbitrary number of file system operations as an atomic unit
• Reads, writes, file creations, deletions, renames, etc.
• Memory mapping
• Continuously Archive log
• Restore the set of files and archived log from backup
• Roll-forward using the log to a chosen point in time
• Full (fast) 2-phase commit on single machine
• Virtual clocks & save-points
• Roll-forward recovery
• Multiple log support
• Highly available (log failover)

Hello Oracle – this is what your DB is able to do – but is your internetFS integrated into the system just like Microsoft's journaling filesystem will be? What are your plans for the future?

I am sure I will track the future development of longhorn as I must admit that Microsoft really introduces a lot of great things into their next generation operating system… every desktop PC is maybe going to handle the same applications' complexity like the average J2EE application server today or in future I guess..

I encourage you to read the sessions-list just like I do currently …