[Zope] Re: updating catalog takes forever (never really completes)

[Luca Olivetti]

Andreas Kostyrka wrote:

> Zope's solution offer only benefit over the competition:
> -) it's more flexible (because Zope is dynamic). Nobody considers using
>    a search engine on it's website to provide navigation.
> -) with the right kind of objects (and plain OFS objects are not really 
>    useable for content) Catalog are never stale, because they are 
>    autoupdated.
> -) it's builtin and it's fast. 
> -) it can do quite expressive searches, because it's more than just a 
>    full text database.

You don't have to sell me zope, I already like it ;-)
Now, all the points you have listed are related to the indexes *not* the 
metadata.

> 
> Basically: Yes it's reduant data. And yes we all learned that reduant
> data is bad at University. Well, and some of us learned in the
> real-world that sometimes reduant data is not bad at all :)
> Especially in this case, as it is just an cache, that can be
> automatically validated.

Automatically validated, yes, automatically generated/maintained, no, 
it's an additional burden to the programmer.

> 
> Well, OTOH, perhaps your are that pure in your thinking, ...
> But then you should turn of the CPU caches off too, that is reduant data
> too. (And with write back caches it's not even reduant data that is NOT
> IN SYNC!)

In an ideal world these would be considered as ugly workarounds for 
something that's either too slow or to expensive to achieve (and, BTW, 
most of these are transparent to the programmer, while the addition and 
use of metadata to the index is not).
OTOH I know we don't live in an ideal world, though I like to dream ;-)

-- 
Luca Olivetti
Wetron Automatización S.A. http://www.wetron.es/
Tel. +34 93 5883004      Fax +34 93 5883007