[Zope] Philosophical question - Zope Objects vs Entities in a RDBMS

[Teodor Cimpoesu]

Rowan Hick wrote:
> 
> Okay so I'm getting into this whole Zope deal, and from what I have seen
> so far it looks pretty darned good, I like the OO concept, but with it
> it poses a few design issues for websites / web applications
> 
> Traditionally all data is stored in some form of relational database,
> and then the scripts pull it back out again. Now we all know and hate
> relational databases (well I do anyway as I'm a child of the information
> age - learning in OO concepts and then having to go back to a relational
> database) but they are remarkably good for what they do - storing large
> amounts of data and allowing you to retrieve it in a quick and
> relatively painless manner, if you get your head around SQL.

Note there are also OO extension to RDBMSs (e.g. Oracle) and Postgres
has
also some concepts implemented.

> 
> Now Zope comes along with the ability to create and persist objects
> without the need for a relational database. Wooohooo... all my prayers
> have been answered, or have they?.
Well it uses it's own database anyways :-)  

> Q1. Has anyone tried to build webapplications with large (maybe into the
> 10's of thousands) numbers of Zope objects?
[skiped - no idea ]
> Q2. How much more or less efficient is Zope for storing a piece of data
> over a traditional relational database ?
Even a ``traditional'' database may be good to store object w/ a little
logic.
Also, I dunno much about the data types definitions in Postgres but I
know
you can define your own types, so why not to try to define class-like
type
where methods are triggers (just a thought)
Of course a DB design specially for this purpose will fit much better.

> Q3 (I'm a newbie here) Can a python external method access Zope objects
> ?  Eg if I create a task object from a ZClass can I then do things with
> it from a python script?

I am a newbie too :-) but learning fast cause python looks very easy
itself.
From what I know so far, yes.

> Q4. I think I remember seeing a post about the Zope database being a
> single large file posing problems with the Linux filesystem.. or was
> that the windows filesystem.. if so then that could limit Zope's
> potential in a commercial production enviroment, surely ?? If this is
> true what have people done to try and get around this, ie archiving
> objects (however that could occur) etc.. ?

IIRC that is a limit for the ext2 file system. There may be other Linux
FSs
that don't have this limit. Also I've heard ext3 is about to come wich I
guess/hope won't have this limit anymore.


-- 
CIMPOESU Teodor, Web Programmer

@ DIGICOM S.A. Bucharest, Romania
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