[Zope-dev] Is ODBC the way to go ?

[Christopher Petrilli]

On 2/4/00 6:46 AM, Richard Moon at richard@dcs.co.uk wrote:

> Being brand new to Zope I may have misunderstood some of the things I have
> seen in the archives but ...it seems that the intention is to concentrate
> on Openlink ODBC for database connections.

This is true for commercial consulting contracts.  We have not stated this
in regards to other users.

> I have used Openlink for many years and would say that it is a fine product
> but I have serious doubts that it is the way to go for general database
> connections. (It's not Open Source either..)

A simple survey of roughly 80 people implied only 3 cared about source, and
I suspect only one of those would actually make a CHANGE to the source, so
lets be careful of red-herrings here.  You're using Informix (closed source)
and then upset that the driver isn't open source?  This is a bit of a
troubling predicament.

Do you have any particular objects that are non-philosophical as regards
OpenLink? 

> My particular background is Informix and I would love to use Zope, but
> there is no native interface. I'm happy to use ODBC during development but
> for a large scale implementation ? Perhaps its just prejudice but it is a
> prejudice which will
> be shared by PHB's everywhere.

An unfounded prejudice.  Some simple benchmarks show that OpenLink is as
fast as using native Oracle SQL*NET interfaces, and sometimes noticeably
faster.  There might be some small hit on a "single machine" implementation,
but this is unlikely to be a performance sensitive installation in the first
place.  

> Also ODBC implies NT and that goes against the whole Open Source philosophy
> surely.

It implies no such thing.  1) ODBC is a specific flavor of X/Open CLI which
is a standard interface to relational databases and is native interface for
IBM DB/2, 2) NT is not specifically anti-source, just the community is not
specifically PRO Open Source.  This is a political discussion that is
inappropriate for any technical forum.

Call it X/Open CLI, that's what we call it.  OpenLink calls it UDBC, but
it's all the same thing underneath.  In this case, Microsoft is *way* ahead
of the UNIX community in "open standards."  They actually changed ODBC back
after v1 to track the standard.
 
> Excuse my ignorance but since there is a Python interface to Informix does
> that not make it possible to link Zope to Informix directly ?

You could probably modify the Oracle DA piece to make it work trivially.  We
simply don't have a customer asking for it, and that means paying customers.
We've also found that there is no such thing as an "unsupported product"
from us.  People expect it to be supported even when we "throw it over the
wall." 

We'd be ecstatic if the Python community made more adapters, but we
currently support Sybase and Oracle, and its a pretty big burden given we
add no value to the equation.  If you were to offer an Informix adapter that
you supported, all the Informix people would love you, as would we. ;-)

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli        Python Powered        Digital Creations, Inc.
| petrilli@digicool.com                             http://www.digicool.com