DNS - Where are settings stored?

After wrestling with some DNS issues I wanted to know where the DNS data was actually stored on a machine. It took me a while to find this link:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsserver2008r2networking/thread/7d7adbb7-f0a3-4292-9417-4024081dd782

Apparently you have to log onto the DNS server and look in the %SystemRoot%\System32\DNS\ directory; the file name I worked with was mydomain.myhost.com.dns where mydomain.myhost.com was the domain name of my environment. Basically, look for a file with the .dns extension. When I looked at the DNS server on our domain I realized it looked a lot like the regular hosts file found on client machines (%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts), but, with significantly more entries. I don't know if the example from this link:

http://zytrax.com/books/dns/ch6/mydomain.html

is Windows or not (I suspect it's not since BIND is more of the UNIX universe) but it gives a good taste of a sample domain:

$TTL 86400 ; 24 hours could have been written as 24h or 1d
$ORIGIN example.com.
@ 1D IN SOA ns1.example.com. hostmaster.example.com. (
2002022401 ; serial
3H ; refresh
15 ; retry
1w ; expire
3h ; minimum
)a
IN NS ns1.example.com. ; in the domain
IN NS ns2.smokeyjoe.com. ; external to domain
IN MX 10 mail.another.com. ; external mail provider
; server host definitions
ns1 IN A 192.168.0.1 ;name server definition
www IN A 192.168.0.2 ;web server definition
ftp IN CNAME www.example.com. ;ftp server definition
; non server domain hosts
bill IN A 192.168.0.3
fred IN A 192.168.0.4