[Zope] ZCatalog Queries...

[Chris Withers]

Chris McDonough wrote:
> 
> > It's be nice if ZCatalog had a good general purpose
> > interface, and was a
> > bit more robust.
> > (the BTree implementation which has been mentioned a few times springs
> > to mind here ;-)
> 
> Can you be more specific?

Andy can fill you in on the specifics.

>  What's insufficient about the current
> implementation?

It doesn't scale well, especially for things where you have lots of new
data arriving (this is the BTree problem, I think...)

It has no published and well defined query syntax (there's patches here,
bits there, but no definitive document on how to use it, how to batch
with it, how to perform complex and structured queries, particularly
with TextIndex'es)

Don't get me wrong, it is very cool, but only kindof 70% there :S
(and I get the impression that doing the remaining 30% properly would
require a rewrite...)

As an example, we've been trying to do Zope-based versions of the
mailing list archives for a coupla months now and the Catalog keeps
exploding in different ways (huge resource consumption, even for only
30K messages or so, no matter what storage is used)

Then there's the ubiquitous 'KeyError's and other associated weirdness,
all of which leaves me feeling a lot less than totally confident in the
Catalog ;-)

comments very welcome,

Chris