[Zope] Should I use ZODB or not ?

[Dieter Maurer]

Jerome Alet writes:
 > 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.

Do not store the files in Zope or serve them with Zope.
A standard web server (e.g. Apache) is at least one order
of magnitude faster than Zope for static content (such as
multi media files). This is essential for you
large file objects.

If you have up to a few thousand objects and they do not change too
often, you can put them (the meta data) into the ZODB.
Otherwise, put them in a RDBMS.
I would use the RDBMS whenever I have one or I have more than
a few hundred objects or I would need access to the data
from legacy processes, too.


Dieter