[ZODB-Dev] Is there an official patch for the problems with packing and data loss?

[Joachim Werner]

>>People really get scared about ZODB ... - I for myself don't
>>trust it any more :-(

> Well, databases are complex pieces of software, and complex software has
> bugs.  Defensive practices, like frequent backups, are always appropriate.

If a database has a bug that makes it lose data most people would call 
it "unusable" ...

Most people back up before packing, but you can't ask people to rely on 
manually recovering data from the backups if the pack went wrong (and 
that seems to be the only way of handling lost data WRT the 2.6.1 ZODB 
bugs). One of the problems is size. If you have large ZODBs (>1 Gig) 
even untaring takes a lot of time ...

> The recently fixed bugs in FileStorage packing have been there a long time,
> and it's a measure of their infrequency and obscurity that it's taken such a
> long time for the cause to be found.  All that time, lots of people got lots
> of value out of FileStorage despite these bugs.  I predict that even more
> people will get even more value out of the new release, despite its
> (currently unknown) bugs too <0.9 wink>.

The bugs might have been there before. But we definitely didn't have 
data loss before 2.5.x (with exactly the same setup and data) ...

Joachim