[Zope] Re: "Automatic" creation of searchable documents from Oracle DB tables

[Satheesh Babu]

Hi Chris,

I've a system, where folks enter data through some
HTML forms -> DTML methods -> Oracle tables. This
is mainly used for storing web page content. Then
I generate a static document using a chosen template,
from the database. I think this is some what similar
to your requirement.

This is seemingly a round about way of doing things.
My reasons:
1. I'm not really confident in ZODB recovery in case of
   a data corruption.
2. I'm lot more confident of getting data out of Oracle
   using SQL, than writing Python on ZODB :-(
3. Our content can grow quite large, 20-25GB is very realistic.
4. Oracle's interMedia search is very capable.
5. As long as core content is in Oracle, the front end can be
   Zope or PHP or ASP as the suites might dictate.

Why the hell do I make static document back from database?
1. Dynamically creating documents from Oracle is time consuming.
   So, I create static version as some kind of cache.
2. To create links between data in database, it is a lot more
   easier for users, with static versions.

I've working code for this that I could share with you. Ideally
what I want is
   1. ZClass to reflect document attributes
	 2. When one manages a ZClass instance, corresponding record
	    in Oracle gets managed as well.
Didn't get time to check this properly. Someone told be ZPatterns
will be of great help. But then again, Paul Everitt has said that
they are working on Oracle+ZODB. I worked on an Oracle based storage
for some time, but then dropped it.

To make a long story short, for help on making static content
from RDBMS, there is an excellent HOW-TO at
www.zope.org/Members/rossl/GenerateStaticPages

HTH
vsbabu@csoft.net
http://www.mamlegault.com/~vsbabu/