Hi, On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 20:17 +0300, Markus wrote: > I'm new here, so hi! ;-) > > I'm looking to create a database of persons and events, later to > search persons by names, events by dates and locations (participants > of events are already in an attribute of the event and instances of > Person, which inherits from Persistent) > > At first I made a PersistentList of all the events and a > PersistentMapping of all the people by an id, but later found out, > that searching through a list with a for-loop is very slow (there are > about 200 000 people and 100 000 events). And so as I've looked around > here a bit (the docs and > the wikis are mostly outdated or empty -- there's also talk about the > bad documentation in this mailinglist) I've found, that I should be > using OOBTree for making the indexes.
Yes, the documentation situation is less than desirable for beginners. :/ > So what I'm asking is, is it reasonable to create the db like this: > persons in root['persons'], > which is a OOBTree, mapping names to Person-objects and events in > root['events'], which also an OOBTree, mapping dates to Event-objects? > And if I want to map locations to events, I should do it at the same > time, when creating the events, so I don't have to loop through all of > them again? Here's what I do: Create a physical structure that models your data in a 'natural' way. This can e.g. be: - A root object representing the application, in case you may want to hold multiple instances of your application within a single database. - BTrees for storing large lists of objects, like you do. But mainly with a single lookup direction, e.g. for you the name-to-person mapping. Some times, those lists just work with arbitrary IDs for the objects, much like primary keys in tables. Alternatively, if you have a VFS-like structure, you might want to use the folder/item metaphor for the main structure of your database. - Add an indexing/searching framework for orthogonal queries. This is called `cataloging` in the Zope/ZODB universe. Some (more or less) standalone solutions are found in the proximity of `zope.catalog`. Use those to create tabular views on your data (independent of the physical structure) that are queryable by indexed arguments. Those are fast. > If I have a OOBTree-mapping of dates to events, what should the values > of it be? PersistentLists? I've read something about Buckets or Sets, > but I'm not sure what they are good > for, Bucket seems to behave like the equivalent BTree (OO, or IO or OI > or IF or ....), but Set seems to be a set... Is that true? I'd go with a flat structure. See my note on 'arbitrary' IDs above. > What's the difference between a PersistentMapping and a OOBTree or > OOBucket? Only the "back-end", because on the front they all seem like > dictionarys? Should I be using OOBTrees and OOBuckets for what I'm > doing, because strings and dates are "O"s and not "I"s or "F"s or... A PM is a persistent dictionary that loads all of its data at once. A bucket is an internal node of a BTree. A BTree is a (key-)sorted(!) data structure that provides a key/value interface like dictionaries do. Due to that, the lookup of items in a BTree is fast and also memory efficient, as only individual buckets of the BTree need to be activated for a lookup (optimally only O(logn) buckets). Christian -- Christian Theune · [EMAIL PROTECTED] gocept gmbh & co. kg · forsterstraße 29 · 06112 halle (saale) · germany http://gocept.com · tel +49 345 1229889 7 · fax +49 345 1229889 1 Zope and Plone consulting and development
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