brian lloyd <brian@digicool.com> wrote: original article:http://www.egroups.com/group/zope/?start=21460

Hi all,

I will be giving a talk at the Zope Track at IPC8 on the future directions of Zope. The format will be about half me babbling about our broad future plans and half Q & A. <snip>

Since you asked ;^), Now that a lot of people are starting to use ZCatalog for retrieving data inside the ZODB, does DC have plans for enhancing ZCatalog with a full-functioned Query engine? Something like "OQL" or SQL3 (i.e. a "standard" query language with support for OODBMS) querying facility? IMHO, this will make the Zope/ZODB a real contender as full-featured OODBMS (along with support for transactions & CORBA support (IIRC, someone has started working with an ILU/Fnorb interface to Zope?)) If only from the *marketing* viewpoint, having a free, robust, and OpenSource OODBMS with support for transactions, CORBA, and OQL/SQL3 querying facility is a *kick-ass* application that even *commercial* (i.e. proprietary) OODBMS would find hard to match! Ideally this Querying facility could do something like : Query --> [QueryParser] --> [QueryOptimizer] ---> [QueryRuntimeEngine] --> ResultSet where the QueryParser translates a SQL3 or OQL query into a set of ZCatalog query atoms (i.e it translates the query into a series of ZCatalog method calls), then the QueryOptimizer (using some set of optimizing transformations & maybe even use data metrics) optimizes the query. Then something like a QueryManager can either store this "optimized" query or call on the QueryRuntimeEngine to execute it and return a Result set. By storing the "optimized" query (something like DB2's statically-bound queries) and just executing them at runtime, we don't incur the overhead of running the parser and optimizer each time we execute the query -- although we could also forgo the storage and just invoke the querying facility "dynamically" where all the processes (parsing, optimization, and execution) are done in sequence(with the intermediate products discarded) -- this is useful for "adhoc" type of queries... I know this will require a *BIG* effort... and the DC folks might not just consider it a priority right now... but could DC or at least the Zope Community consider it and give it a thought now and then? Regards, Butch P.S. I hope all the Zope presentors at IPC8 post an article or even a short update on papers/talks presented at the ZopeTrack so that those of us who can't make it would at least get a feel for whats going on there... __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com