[Zope] ZCatalog capabilities

[Dieter Maurer]

nwingfield at che-llp.com wrote at 2003-11-10 17:51 -0500:
 > I'm working on an enterprise document management system that needs highly
 > flexible metadata structures - based on dynamic, customizable document
 > types - and lightning fast queries on this metadata.  The idea is to use
 > the metadata associated with each document to dynamically generate flexible
 > navigation routes and search interfaces (think iTunes or iPod) for any
 > document type.  Question is:  is ZCatalog robust enough for this purpose or
 > will I be better served by a relational data model?  Up to this point, I
 > have relied on Zope's object database, but I'm afraid that ZCatalogs are
 > just not sophisticated enough to do the job.  I would appreciate input from
 > anyone with real world experience in ZCatalogs.

The ZCatalog has very limited search capabilities.
All it provides out of the box is the intersection
of subqueries to a set of indexes.

ZCatalog has a flexible indexing framework and you can
plug in sophisticated indexes. With respect to a single
index, you can have (depending on the index type)
and/or/not/near/synonym/thesaurus/... subqueries.

However, such subqueries can only be combined by intersection.
You do not have union, difference and you do not have things
like joins.


For really complex queries, I would not go for ZCatalog.


-- 
Dieter