[Zope] Should I use ZODB or not ?

[Jerome Alet]

Hi,

we are currently planning to create a multimedia database and are
investigating different solutions.

I'm pushing toward a Zope based one, especially for the permissions needs
we have, but I was wondering if ZODB can handle our needs or if we should
store multimedia files directly on the file system. 

Our needs are to store hundreds, and possibly thousands of MPEG2 and MPEG4
(generally short) video movies, MP3 audio files, JPEG images, etc...

Altough most of the files will be in the 1 Mb -> 10 Mb range, some could
be larger, e.g. some Gigabytes.

For each file we also want to keep some data: author, subject, encoding,
description, keywords, domain, etc... 

I see 5 solutions:	

	1 - store both files and their associated datas in ZODB
	2 - store files in the filesystem and datas in ZODB
	3 - store files in the filesystem and datas in an RDBMS
	    (use Zope only for the presentation of files and datas)
	4 - store files in ZODB and datas in an RDBMS.
	5 - don't use Zope at all because it's not appropriate.

While I'm pretty sure I can design something more or less working like the
1 above in a few time with a few multimedia files and datas, please could
you tell me what seems the best solution to you in the long run ?

IMHO the 1 (if Zope scales well) and 2 are best, but we may as well use
the 3. 4 doesn't seem natural to me, and I personnaly exclude the 5 ;-)

Another question I wanted to ask: does Zope have a limit on the size of
uploaded files, given the fact that we may want to upload files as large
as some Gb and that we will use a linux filesystem not limited to 2 Gb per
file. 

Please show me the light.

thanks in advance.

Jerome ALET - alet@unice.fr - http://cortex.unice.fr/~jerome
Faculte de Medecine de Nice - http://noe.unice.fr - Tel: 04 93 37 76 30 
28 Avenue de Valombrose - 06107 NICE Cedex 2 - FRANCE