LHS Feature Of The Week #1 - Transactional NTFS

  • Article

Hello everyone, and welcome to the “Feature Of The Week” newsletter. In the Feature Of The Week Newsletter, we visit a new feature coming in Longhorn Server every week. The goal is that these are nice, short, and efficient to minimize the amount of effort required by you, the reader. With every Feature Of The Week, we will provide links to more resources in case you want to spend more time diving into the feature covered.

So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the Longhorn Server Feature Of The Week!

What is Transactional NTFS? Transactional NTFS is an enhancement to NTFS that allows all file operations on an NTFS file system volume to be performed within the scope of a transaction. This is made possible by a new transaction infrastructure in the kernel that allows operating system services to participate in transactions via the new Kernel Transaction Manager.

What scenarios does this enable? Transactional NTFS is also fully capable of communicating with the MS Distributed Transaction Coordinator, meaning that TxF operations can participate in transactions that are leveraging any other Resource Manager that DTC is capable of working with. What does this mean to you? It means that you can now have an application that not only encompasses database calls, but also operations to the file system as well (think of Document Management solutions). With transaction enhancements being made to the new SMB 2.0 protocol, you can also now contain distributed file operations within a transaction as well.

Resources

Enjoy!