[Zope-dev] GADFLY Database: Can it lose data if the Zope process is aborted?

[J. Cameron Cooper]

>
>
>I know that Gadfly is not to be used for serious applications etc., but I
>thought that this was because of performance issues, not because it can lose
>data. Has anybody had similar experiences? Our first tests say that Gadfly
>stores all INSERTs into the DB file right after they have been commited. So
>the only explanation for data loss would be some strange caching that is not
>always used ...
>
I don't know about the guts of Gadfly, but you may have run afoul of 
Python's file handling. The docs warn that data written to a file object 
can not be counted on to appear on the disk until it is either closed or 
flushed. (I think, though, that this is very rarely a problem when 
dealing with human timespans.) I would think that an orderly shutdown of 
Zope would instruct Gadfly to shutdown gracefully, but I can't be sure 
of that.

I've never had any persistence problems with Gadfly, but then, I've 
never done anything really substantial with it.

            --jcc
        (bottlefly)