Web Storage System

Both Tahoe and Exchange 2000 utilize an underlying database technology called the Web Storage System, or “Web Store” for short. The Web Store allows applications to store and retrieve documents using the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV or HTTP-DAV) protocol, to write and read data within the store. (For more information on WebDAV, see “What is WebDAV?” on page 7 of the Sept. 1999 Update.) The Web Storage system is built using Microsoft’s Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) technology. Also known as Jet, the ESE is a fully transactional engine that defines a very low-level API to the underlying database structures comprising the Web Store. The ESE/Jet technology is fast, robust, and proven in products such as Exchange and Active Directory.

Every item in the Web Storage System is URL-addressable, whether it be a document, contact record, message, report, HTML file, or Active Server Page (ASP). The Web Store comes with a large number of predefined content classes and properties, including messages, appointments, contacts, folders, and documents. The Web Store schema can be extended to support nearly any type of semi-structured data.