[Zope-dev] Using Zope for Groupware/Messaging applications

[Joachim Werner]

Hi!

We are currently developing a groupware system with Zope. As usual, the options 
for the storage back-end are using a SQL DB (postgres, ...) or ZODB.

I know that this question has been asked a thousand times. But I'll repeat it 
for our specific situation:

SQL or ZODB+ZCatalog, which one is better?

We have thousands, maybe millions of objects (mainly mail messages, notes, 
appointments).

There should be very flexible views on the data, e.g. a message or document can 
either be viewed on the owner's personal workspace or on the project portal the 
document was posted to.

The problems with SQL:

- much more complex setup
- problems with using ZEO
- BLOBs (large binary objects like image files) don't work well on most 
databases

The problems with ZODB/ZCatalog:

- ZCatalog is not tested for extremly large numbers of objects. We fear that 
the index tables will become much too big

- Some advanced queries are very hard to implement using ZCatalog

Any comments?

Joachim.