[Zope] Interest in continued Oracle support in Zope

[Anthony Baxter]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 08:10:28 +0200, Dario Lopez-Kästen
<dario at ita.chalmers.se> wrote:
> 1) Does anyone else out there have a business case for
>     using Oracle with Python/Zope?

It's an absolute requirement for us. We use it every day, from a large
installation of ZEO clients. It's used for both end-user things, and
for the session database (via SQLSession). I don't recall having many
problems with it, and none at all recently.

> 2) Will those from (1) suffer badly, ie. will switch
>     from Python or Zope to something else, if Oracle
>     support in Python/Zope would dissapear?

What do you mean "disappear"? In our case, we're not going to rewrite
the applications in something other than Zope, there's just no way to
justify the expense. It's all open source, so I can't see how it could
ever "disappear". If a new version of Zope came out that in some way
made it impossible to access Oracle, we'd just stick with the version
that works.

> 3) Will those from (1) suffer badly, ie. will switch
>     from Python or Zope to something else, if Oracle
>     support is not improved? (ie less crashes, better
>     throughput, etc).

We don't have crashes. The throughput isn't an issue for us, it's
proven to be fine.

> 4) Of those who say yes to at least one of 1-3, which
>     ones can invest actual cash to create and maintain
>     good quality Oracle Support in Python/Zope?

In the past we've spent money on various bits of Zope (via ZC) to
improve database connectivity. I don't see any need to do so at the
moment, as the Oracle interface isn't broken for us.

> 5) Of those who say yes to at least one of 1-3, which
>     ones can invest *time* to create and maintain good
>     quality Oracle Support in Python/Zope?

As I said - if Oracle was broken at some point, I'd fix it, in the
same way that I fixed broken ZClasses in 2.6 (ObChrisWithersNote: Yes,
yes, I know. Shut up.) That, to me, is part of the *reason* we use
open source for critical infrastructure - we're not forced to switch
to SQL Server because our vendor got bought by Microsoft, for
instance.
 
> Also, I seem to be one of those that really stretch the limits on
> DCOracle2 - we use it super-extensivly for thousends of users, and seem
> to encounter all kinds of problems with it, ranging from lockups to
> connectivity loss.

We don't see this. We run on Solaris, talking to Oracle 8.1.7, with a
couple of dozen ZEO clients across the entire installation - they all
have at least one connection to an Oracle database - in some cases,
they have several different connections (for instance, SQLSession
works far better if you give it it's own DB connection). The primary
cluster has something like 9 ZEO clients, and it gets hammered 24x7. I
cannot recall the last time we had problems with the Zope/Oracle
interaction, it's at least a couple of years ago. This has been in use
for something like 5+ years now.

Anthony