[Zope-DB] Oracle & Zope

[Chris Withers]

Hi All,

There's been a fair bit of discussion about using Oracle from Zope both on and 
off the lists recently, so I thought I'd some up the possibilities:

1. Continue to use ZOracleDA including DCOracle2. This option is no longer 
supported by Zope Corp. Matt Kromer has expressed an interested in maintaining 
ZOracleDA/DCOracle2 but I'm not sure of his availability to do so. The code for 
DCOracle2 seems quite... interesting... but then I don't read C-for-Python very 
well. There do seem to be issues compiling it for certain Oracle/Zope/OS 
combinations, and it can use huge numbers of Oracle connections if you have lots 
of Connection objects in Zope. There is a branch in CVS to deal with this, but 
it currently has some bugs of its own.

2. Use mxODBC and connect to Oracle via ODBC. mxODBC appears to be stable and 
very well maintained, but I've never used it myself. Can it be used to connect 
from *nix? What about *nix to Windows? What are the drives that lead people to 
choose native adapters over ODBC and vice versa?

3. Develop a new Zope Database Adapter for the cxOracle library, or use an 
existing one if such a thing exists. Several people have said good things about 
cxOracle. How well supported is it? Who uses it already?

I'd be very interested to hear views on the above, particularly from Matt, the 
eGenix guys and the cxOracle maintainers if anyone knows how to contact them...

cheers,

Chris

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