[Zope-dev] Is ODBC the way to go ?

[Richard Moon]

Hi Chris

You asked if I had any non-philosophical objections to Openlink and I have 
to say no I don't  - it's a good product. I've been using Openlink 
multi-tier for several years now on several clients sites and it has 
behaved faultlessly. We have found that upgrades are easy and smooth. 
Support is truly excellent as well - even if you are running the no-cost 
licence.

I don't have much information on performance as we use native Informix 
connections for our programs. Openlink is used by Access and Excel users 
mainly - on an occasional basis -though we have not experienced any 
noticeable performance problems. Because we are only using ODBC for 
read-only selects on the database I cannot comment on how well it supports 
all the features which Informix provides.

Is it likely that in the near future you will be releasing ZODBC on non 
Win32 clients ?

As for your 'troubling predicament' comment - don't forget that Informix 
was around long before open source was thought of - as was I :-). I don't 
see that because we are starting from a given point, we should not try to 
move in a preferred direction.


Regards

Richard

At 11:49 04/02/00 -0500, you wrote:
>On 2/4/00 6:46 AM, Richard Moon at richard@dcs.co.uk wrote:
>
> > Being brand new to Zope I may have misunderstood some of the things I have
> > seen in the archives but ...it seems that the intention is to concentrate
> > on Openlink ODBC for database connections.
>
>This is true for commercial consulting contracts.  We have not stated this
>in regards to other users.
>
> > I have used Openlink for many years and would say that it is a fine product
> > but I have serious doubts that it is the way to go for general database
> > connections. (It's not Open Source either..)
>
>A simple survey of roughly 80 people implied only 3 cared about source, and
>I suspect only one of those would actually make a CHANGE to the source, so
>lets be careful of red-herrings here.  You're using Informix (closed source)
>and then upset that the driver isn't open source?  This is a bit of a
>troubling predicament.
>
>Do you have any particular objects that are non-philosophical as regards
>OpenLink?
>
> > My particular background is Informix and I would love to use Zope, but
> > there is no native interface. I'm happy to use ODBC during development but
> > for a large scale implementation ? Perhaps its just prejudice but it is a
> > prejudice which will
> > be shared by PHB's everywhere.
>
>An unfounded prejudice.  Some simple benchmarks show that OpenLink is as
>fast as using native Oracle SQL*NET interfaces, and sometimes noticeably
>faster.  There might be some small hit on a "single machine" implementation,
>but this is unlikely to be a performance sensitive installation in the first
>place.
>
> > Also ODBC implies NT and that goes against the whole Open Source philosophy
> > surely.
>
>It implies no such thing.  1) ODBC is a specific flavor of X/Open CLI which
>is a standard interface to relational databases and is native interface for
>IBM DB/2, 2) NT is not specifically anti-source, just the community is not
>specifically PRO Open Source.  This is a political discussion that is
>inappropriate for any technical forum.
>
>Call it X/Open CLI, that's what we call it.  OpenLink calls it UDBC, but
>it's all the same thing underneath.  In this case, Microsoft is *way* ahead
>of the UNIX community in "open standards."  They actually changed ODBC back
>after v1 to track the standard.
>
> > Excuse my ignorance but since there is a Python interface to Informix does
> > that not make it possible to link Zope to Informix directly ?
>
>You could probably modify the Oracle DA piece to make it work trivially.  We
>simply don't have a customer asking for it, and that means paying customers.
>We've also found that there is no such thing as an "unsupported product"
>from us.  People expect it to be supported even when we "throw it over the
>wall."
>
>We'd be ecstatic if the Python community made more adapters, but we
>currently support Sybase and Oracle, and its a pretty big burden given we
>add no value to the equation.  If you were to offer an Informix adapter that
>you supported, all the Informix people would love you, as would we. ;-)
>
>Chris
>--
>| Christopher Petrilli        Python Powered        Digital Creations, Inc.
>| petrilli@digicool.com                             http://www.digicool.com
>


Richard Moon
richard@dcs.co.uk