The multi-faced nature of the NSF

I'm running the XPages enablement workshop in Beijing this week. Having to teach other about new functionality guarantees either dispair or insight. Today I had a rather insightful moment. Very often the NSF gets blasted for being a "flat-file-non-relational-whatever" file. When having a closer look at the format however you will realize, that it is a quite amazing part of technology:

• Build to function as a "whatever-you-want-to-dump-into" data store
• Build backward compatible. I still can open R2 databases in my R8.5 client
• Build to run on a client and on a server with high concurrent access
• Build to be robust: event if you tourture it (diskspace, sectors etc.) it will mostly recover
• Build to provide fulltext search access
• Build to be what you want it to be: if you happen to be a Notes client or a Domino server, it is a repository for design elements and a document database. If you happen to be the Eclipse IDE (or a webDAV client) it is a file system. If you happen to be the XPages server task it is a WAR application store. And if you happen to be David Allen, it is your trusted system for Getting-Things-Done