[Zope] ZOPE ODBC on Linux

[Paul Everitt]

> > Randall Marbach wrote:
> > > 
> > > Is it possible for a Zope 1.9 installation running on a 
> linux platform (redhat
> > > 5.2) to access a MS ACCESS database located on a 
> different NT server via the
> > > ODBC support built into Zope?
> > 
> > As Access is not a client-server database, you are unable to use it 
> > even from another Windows (NT or 9x) machine.
> 
> Uh, you could do something complicated involving e.g. RemoteCall from
> Linux to a Win32 box, and a PythonCOM program on Win32 box.  

Hate to talk about something we aren't publicly releasing, but...we've
been doing this for about two years now.  We had a Principia Product
that called a Network Client that allowed a local object to be a proxy
for a remote "searchable object" (read: SQL Method).

The two processes communicated via HTTP.  The initial request was
marshalled, rotor'd, then base64'd and packed in the body of the HTTP
request to the second server which ran the query and packaged up the
results in the same way.  Tracebacks on the server were re-raised on the
client process.  We later added caching.

Thus for a long time the digicool.com site, running on Linux,
authenticated users against data stored in Lotus Notes on NT.  The
response time was pretty spiffy.

This project came from the original customer project that created our
relational database integration back at the end of 1996.  We federated
queries for the Department of Defense across a Sybase and Oracle
databases running on different machines in different time zones.  We
continue to use it in our consulting gigs (in fact, a customer that is
onsite here today is getting it).

I imagine some enterprising soul could craft up a cool solution using
XML-RPC or the like...

--Paul

Paul Everitt       Digital Creations
paul@digicool.com  540.371.6909