Lookit there,the race is on. After reading About Face, I got the picture of what Gates is trying to do with Longhorn -- finally abstract the file system from a user's experience. MS is using the SQL server engine to store files and essentially get rid of the old-style file system, allowing for quick searches and less of, "Now where the heck did I store that .doc?"

I'd wondered if Apple would try to do the same or if this "fileless" OS from MS would be alone in the desktop OS field. Looks like Apple's following suit.

Most revolutionary feature [in OS X 10.4/Tiger]: searching. too many folders now on our hard disk. How to solve it? We already have solved it. in iTunes, you can find a song by title artist, album etc... in a second, just by typing into the search field. Apply to the entire system. 'Spotlight' search tech. You can ask it stuff like find my keynote presentation by phil which I opened last week.

Well, as long as they realize iTunes is losing a lot from not being normalized then I'm happy. Just wonder how they're doing it -- dbms in the OS finally?