Thre are some contexts where one might want ot store media fiesl in the ZODB up to cettain size or wher they are known to be static, while at a certain point they need to migrate to LocalFS, ExtFile/Image etc. Documents are the same.
I think this is heading in the wrong direction.... ZODB isn't magic, and neither is Persistence, they're both controllable. There was a discussion a while back about 'fine grained pack' of the ZODB -- that would really be a great feature, and it seems there's some work going on in that area. Perhaps each object could have a pack(date) method. But aside from that, the only clear need I've seen for external storage is external (outside zope) access, which is a requirement independent of size or number of files...
Please clarify for me then.. ZODB is best when: - There are more READs than WRITEs. Because of 'Undo', WRITE intensive designs will swell ZODB too quickly External Storage is best - There are frequent WRITEs. - Very Large Files, or files which start off small and become very large later, [Digital Video for example]. These couild more quickly combine to tip ZODB past 2Gb limit [not a problem everywhere] - Sharing data with others applications, sharing with Apache, whatever - Need to leverage directly the filesystem's permissions [Linux & family] What do you think? ./Jason