[Zope-DB] Relational Databases in Zope 2 and Zope 3

Charlie Clark charlie at egenix.com
Tue Jun 29 12:55:04 EDT 2004


On 2004-06-29 at 17:17:13 [+0200], Scot Roberts <scot.roberts at five.tv> 
wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
> 
> >
> > The dilemma here is similar to the classic one between OLAP and OLTP:
> > arbitrarily flexible queries are death to transactional throughput.
> >
> > If your application *needs* this flexibility, then you *can't* take
> > advantage of prepared queries anyway, as there is no "canonical" version
> > of the query to prepare.  There are is *huge* space of applications,
> > however, which *could* benefit from prepared queries;  for them the
> > price of DTML's flexibility is both painful and unneccessary.

Yes, thank you Tres and Matt for very succinct statements of why Zope could 
do better at RDBMS. I have an application that has say 2 or 3 query fields 
and over a 100 ZSQL methods. Now, the discussion about whether this is the 
right way to do things aside, I am sure that my development and my 
application would benefit from some changes in ZSQL methods and Zope's 
interaction with RDBMS.

> > Tres.
> 
> Which means that there's a need for both ZSQL Methods as they stand now
> (perhaps with the dtml- bit removed from the tags) for those of us who
> value flexibility over raw throughput and some other method for writing
> prepared queries. Although have to wonder why I wouldn't just used a
> stored procedure on the db server instead of having a prepared query in
> Zope, because if I was that concerned with performance that's what I do.

This goes back to my original point: ZSQL Methods have been good *enough* 
so far for so nobody's got round to changing them. But there do seem to be 
some people who think that there is benefit to be gained from supporting 
positional parameters and doing templating differently than with 
<dtml-sql>. We will produce something new and have to offer backwards 
compatibility at a later stage - I'd like to disable it initially to be 
able to focus on what I'd like to.

Charlie


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