[Zope] database size's for knowledge base and squishdot

Phillip J. Eby pje@telecommunity.com
Thu, 28 Oct 1999 11:51:09 -0500


At 09:25 PM 10/27/99 -0700, Geoff Nordli wrote:
>Out of curiousity how large can applications like the
>knowledge base, and squishdot get before moving away
>from Zope's default storage.

How big would you like it to get?  The limiting factors on Zope's
performance are its dynamic page generation speed, and the number of writes
being done to the database, not the database size or retrieval speed.

In other words, if your database is updated relatively infrequently
compared to how often it's read, you can have very large databases, up to
even the gigabyte range, and still have good performance.  Packing time and
startup time may be issues for you in that range, depending on how many
actual objects are involved.


>How easy would it be to move to something like MySQL or
>PostgreSQL.

Do you mean moving the object database, or changing your application to use
an SQL database?  If you think an SQL DB is the right tool for the job, you
should write your application for that from the beginning.

If you mean, can you make a Zope "Storage" based on those, which would let
you use the standard Zope tools, the answer is yes, you can, but you'd
probably be better off using a Zope BerkeleyStorage, if the reason you want
to go to an SQL database is to improve the performance of database writes.