Other notable applications of structured storage include SQL Server, the Windows shell, and many third-party CAD programs.
Structured storage addresses some inherent difficulties of storing multiple data objects within a single file.
Of course, there are many possible solutions to this difficulty, but often the application programmer does not want to deal with low level details such as binary file formats.
Structured storage provides an abstraction known as a stream, represented by the interface IStream.
However, the feature was withdrawn after Beta 3 due to incompatibilities with other OS components, and any NSS files automatically converted to the single data stream format.