oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

[Joachim Werner]

> The other motivations for an RDBMS are (1) people have existing schemas
> and want Zope to access the same data as their existing apps, and they
> want it to be transparent, and (2) tables with millions of entries are
> easily stored in Zope but the perception is that the catalog isn't as
> fast as a database index.  No one has done any tests AFAIK.

Then we should do these tests. E.g. I'd like to see:

- 20 GB of Word and PDF documents stored in the ZODB and full-text +
metadata indexed in ZCatalog
- the complete zope@zope.org mailing list archive in the ZODB

If Zope can handle those without the help of external tools (RDBMS etc.),
I'll use it for all our Document Management ...

> That's one reason ZODB is so nice.  You can write an application without
> writing a formal schema.

Another thing (from the Slashdot article earlier this week): In Java,
changes to the object structure mean "recompile". In Zope, you can just do
them. with working "refresh" support this will even work without having to
restart the Zope process ...

> > What about using a real oodb for zope? Dont remember any particular
> > product name, but I heard something.
>
> Actually OracleStorage and bsddbstorage, recently released, are designed
> to address concerns about performance and reliability, and they do an
> excellent job at it.  And I consider ZODB as "real" an OODB as anything
> else.  (In some ways it's the best out there IMHO.)

Agreed. ZODB has a much longer proven history of success than most other
OODBs.