[Zope] ZODB robustness

[corey@axcelerant.com]

Yo!


  Hey, I got a few questions and could use the advice from some
  of you experts out there.

  First off, a quick background.  I'm in the current design and
  analysis stage of a major new project.  What I'm doing is a
  complete re-write of a venerable Operational Support System -
  essentially, an n-tier framework that will be the ultimate,
  back-bone engine ultimately running the whole company. Mission
  Critical comes to mind...
  
  My vision is to implement this thing entirely, from start to 
  finish, thoroughly in an object-oriented model. This is easy
  as far as the web-application ( our front-end user interface )
  is concerned, of course, by using Zope. However, in order to
  see a pervasive object-orientd design through and through -
  I'd also like to store all *data* as objects, within an Object
  Database as well -- rather than the more traditional means of
  using an RDBMS as the data-store and composing and decomposing
  complex objects into tables...  Yuck.
  
  Now, as a ( rather pleasant ) side-affect of choosing Zope as
  our Web Application Server - it looks like Python will be the
  choosen language that we'll be using to construct this OSS
  in. Which leaves every OODB *I'm* aware of out ( they all only
  support C++, Java and/or Smalltalk ) -- except, that is, for 
  ZODB.
  
  So there it is. Can a whole company confidently rely on ZODB 
  as a robust ( I know it's scalable, with ZEO ) OODB solution 
  for a large, highly-active, mission-critical, highly-available, 
  enterprise Operational Support System infrastructure? Storing 
  and serving thousands of objects? For added reliability, I've 
  looked into utilizing one of the custom ZODB storage types - 
  namely, OracleStorage looks like the ticket - rather than the 
  standard FileStorage Data.fs.

  So please, tell me - am I totally wacked? Crazy? Stark-raving
  Mad? Should I just use Zope and stick with Oracle rdbms for
  the data store, or is ZODB truly a viable and robust OODB?
  I really appreciate any and all comments, advice or rotten
  vegetables, thanks!


Beers,

Corey