[Zope] ZODB vs Relational Databases

[Jeremy Cowgar]

On Monday 10 March 2003 09:05 am, Michael Long wrote:
> Please forgive me if this is in a FAQ somewhere. I am writting an
> application that will be capturing financial information. If I use the
> ZODB and create expense and income objects to capture this information
> there will over a 1000 objects added a week. I will be tracking history,
> archiving data, etc. Is Zope the right tool for this type of application
> or am I better off creating the objects that this data is associated
> (companies, people, properties, etc) within the ZODB and using a
> relational database such as PostgreSQL to track the higher volume
> financial data.

I asked the same question not too long ago and the answer I got was to give it 
a try and see what it will handle. So far I have been impressed. It requires 
re-thinking if you are a RDBMS guy like me (and like you sound). For 
instance, do not store relations by id, or key, or other values. It'll slow 
things down, store them by path.

Say for instance you have a class and students. Each student can belong to a 
class....

/class/math
/class/history

Those are the paths to the classes. Now in your student table, store that 
path. That is the relation.

Hope this helps. I have loaded it with 31102 * 5 objects. (5 Bible 
translations at 31102 verses (objects) per).

If you do decide to use RDBMS however, it plugs into zope very nicely, so no 
concerns their either.

Jeremy