At one point, the person doing the interview asks, "So, what do you guys think of the Registry?". Awkward silence, followed by uncomfortable laughter. Finally, one of the programmers says, "I think it's fair to say it was far more [widely used] than any of its designers had anticipated."

(Quoting from memory from a video I saw once, ~10 years ago, so the wording might not be perfectly accurate, but that's how I remember it.)

Powershell comes with a kind of FUSE mount for the registry:

    PS C:\> Set-Location HKCU:
    PS HKCU:\> Get-ChildItem -Recurse | where-object { $_.Name -match "HeidiSQL" }

    cd HKCU:
    ls -r -i *HeidiSQL*

    ls -r | ? {$_.Name -match "HeidiSQL"}

  PS C:\> cd hkcu:
  PS HKCU:\> ls -r | ? name -m 'HeidiSQL'

This is not correct, Windows Registry updates are atomic and transactional. There may be other problems with the registry model, but it is a "real" database.

You mean transactions? Windows registry supports them since Vista when they added Kernel Transaction Manager: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb9...

See CreateTransaction, RegCreateKeyTransacted, RegOpenKeyTransacted, CommitTransaction[Async], RollbackTransaction[Async] APIs.

In cases when I need to write several values atomically (e.g. in a program with persistent window positions, after user moved a window I want to write all 4 coordinates of the rectangle), I just keep them in a single value, either string or binary. Even without KTM, registry API already guarantees value writes are atomic.

Could you point out which of these doesn't work as intended?