[ZODB-Dev] What is meant by 'using RDMBS as the back-end storage'?

[Monty Taylor]

"Jeff Kowalczyk" <jtk@adelphia.net> writes:

> When articles mention that Zope's ODB can now "use a variety of back-end
> storages, including RDBMS'", are they referring to:
> 
> The the ability to connect to and query *external* existing data tables
> in mySQL, postgres, and others, and query that with ZSQL
> 
> -or- 
> 
> are some users' Zopes configured to flatten the object store directly
> into an RDBMS as the primary storage, instead of zope's customary
> 'database file'. Could you not query this with SQL from within Zope to
> do ad-hoc reporting?

As is normally the case, the answer is 'C'. You can configure Zope to
store its objects into a RDBMS. We are using Oracle, for
instance. However, there is no 'flattening out' going on. It stores
pickles in the RDBMS, so while you could query the database for ad-hoc
reporting, the reports would not be readable. :) (Unless you were
looking for reports on the last time Zope committed an object.) That
said, the pickle spec is open, so there is nothing stopping you from
reading pickles with external tools. Just unlikely that you'll find it
too useful.


HTH,

Monty