Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-14 Thread Mail List

From: Joachim Werner [EMAIL PROTECTED]

  This is true in the ZODB, but can be complicated by acquisition. If an
  object can acquire itself, it can cause issues. Plus it becomes
  difficult to know whether objects are clones or just identical
  instances, although this can be mitigated by exposing their Python
  instance id.

 Acquisition is very cool, but it sometimes really sucks ... AFAIK you can
 easily switch it off in your own Python products. But I am still
fighting
 with only getting private variables (i.e. not acquired ones) in DTML ...

From DTML I have used 2 different methods for this:
1) dtml-with expr=object only
 .
/dtml-with

or
2) dtml-if expr=_.hostattr(object.aq_explicit('attribute')
   ...
/dtml-if

In both cases 'object' is the thing with the 'private variables' and in 2),
'attribute' is the 'variable' name.
Jeff



___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-14 Thread Shane Hathaway

Joachim Werner wrote:
 
  Probably I'm daft because it is Friday night, but AFAIK ZODB and most
 OODB's
  store an object only once, keyed by its object id. The rest is just
 references
  through that oid, so objects that belong to more than one container can be
  added to all these containers and n:m relations are implemented by having
 a
  list of objects on both sides.
 
 Yes, but these references (let's call them symlinks ...) are not in the
 standard Zope. Of course it should be easy to do these things, but except
 for this from Shane I haven't seen anything so far:
 http://www.zope.org/Members/hathawsh/Symlink/index_html

Actually I was referring to the OODB-equivalent of hard links.  It's
only possible from Python products / external methods / filesystem
scripts / Zope core code, but here's how you do it:

ob = some_folder.some_child
some_other_folder.some_child = ob

In other words, if you just assign an object to have multiple parents
then it will just work.  Changes to the object will appear to occur in
both places, but really they're only occurring in one place.  This
behavior is fully persistent, works over ZEO, and ZODB won't even see
there's anything unusual.

 P.S.: Shane, have you developed Symlinks any further? I think they could be
 extremely useful. I tried out the initial release and liked it, except for
 the fact that the symlinks looked EXACTLY like real ones, so they can be
 very irritating ...

I'm not sure what to do with symlinks.  How should security be applied? 
How are they most useful?

It's neat to see it works, though. :-)

Shane

___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-14 Thread Jeff

From: Joachim Werner [EMAIL PROTECTED]

  This is true in the ZODB, but can be complicated by acquisition. If an
  object can acquire itself, it can cause issues. Plus it becomes
  difficult to know whether objects are clones or just identical
  instances, although this can be mitigated by exposing their Python
  instance id.

 Acquisition is very cool, but it sometimes really sucks ... AFAIK you can
 easily switch it off in your own Python products. But I am still
fighting
 with only getting private variables (i.e. not acquired ones) in DTML ...



From DTML I have used 2 different methods for this:
1) 
dtml-with expr=object only
 .
/dtml-with

or
2) 
dtml-if expr=_.hostattr(object.aq_explicit('attribute')
   ...
/dtml-if

In both cases 'object' is the thing with the 'private variables' and in 2),
'attribute' is the 'variable' name.
Jeff




___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-14 Thread Juan David Ibáñez Palomar

 
  P.S.: Shane, have you developed Symlinks any further? I think they could be
  extremely useful. I tried out the initial release and liked it, except for
  the fact that the symlinks looked EXACTLY like real ones, so they can be
  very irritating ...
 
 I'm not sure what to do with symlinks.  How should security be applied? 
 How are they most useful?
 
 It's neat to see it works, though. :-)
 
 Shane
 
 

Last year I needed symlinks and developed a version of your product
where the symlink had a different id than the real object. But the
general solution of a symlink where an arbitrary set of attributes
are from the symlink instance instead of from the real object was
too much difficult for me, so this year we've changed the dessign
of the application and don't need symlinks anymore.


jdavid

___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-13 Thread Joachim Werner

 This is true in the ZODB, but can be complicated by acquisition. If an
 object can acquire itself, it can cause issues. Plus it becomes
 difficult to know whether objects are clones or just identical
 instances, although this can be mitigated by exposing their Python
 instance id.

Acquisition is very cool, but it sometimes really sucks ... AFAIK you can
easily switch it off in your own Python products. But I am still fighting
with only getting private variables (i.e. not acquired ones) in DTML ...


___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-13 Thread Joachim Werner

 Probably I'm daft because it is Friday night, but AFAIK ZODB and most
OODB's
 store an object only once, keyed by its object id. The rest is just
references
 through that oid, so objects that belong to more than one container can be
 added to all these containers and n:m relations are implemented by having
a
 list of objects on both sides.

Yes, but these references (let's call them symlinks ...) are not in the
standard Zope. Of course it should be easy to do these things, but except
for this from Shane I haven't seen anything so far:
http://www.zope.org/Members/hathawsh/Symlink/index_html

P.S.: Shane, have you developed Symlinks any further? I think they could be
extremely useful. I tried out the initial release and liked it, except for
the fact that the symlinks looked EXACTLY like real ones, so they can be
very irritating ...

Joachim


___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-11 Thread Cees de Groot

Shane Hathaway [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
That's one reason ZODB is so nice.  You can write an application without
writing a formal schema.

One of the reasons I am seriously considering to migrate our production
database from PostgreSQL to ZODB. I am about to implement our product
database, and it is just too darn complex to bother maintaining SQL tables for
it...

Actually OracleStorage and bsddbstorage, recently released, are designed
to address concerns about performance and reliability, and they do an
excellent job at it.  And I consider ZODB as real an OODB as anything
else.  (In some ways it's the best out there IMHO.)

I heard that OracleStorage was quite a bit slower? And from what I've seen
from FileStorage, it's a basic transaction log - what can be more reliable
than that?

Are people using ZODB for non-Zope data? I'd be very interested to discuss
things like emulating extents, patterns for indexing, etcetera...



___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-11 Thread Joachim Werner

 The other motivations for an RDBMS are (1) people have existing schemas
 and want Zope to access the same data as their existing apps, and they
 want it to be transparent, and (2) tables with millions of entries are
 easily stored in Zope but the perception is that the catalog isn't as
 fast as a database index.  No one has done any tests AFAIK.

Then we should do these tests. E.g. I'd like to see:

- 20 GB of Word and PDF documents stored in the ZODB and full-text +
metadata indexed in ZCatalog
- the complete [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list archive in the ZODB

If Zope can handle those without the help of external tools (RDBMS etc.),
I'll use it for all our Document Management ...

 That's one reason ZODB is so nice.  You can write an application without
 writing a formal schema.

Another thing (from the Slashdot article earlier this week): In Java,
changes to the object structure mean recompile. In Zope, you can just do
them. with working refresh support this will even work without having to
restart the Zope process ...

  What about using a real oodb for zope? Dont remember any particular
  product name, but I heard something.

 Actually OracleStorage and bsddbstorage, recently released, are designed
 to address concerns about performance and reliability, and they do an
 excellent job at it.  And I consider ZODB as real an OODB as anything
 else.  (In some ways it's the best out there IMHO.)

Agreed. ZODB has a much longer proven history of success than most other
OODBs.



___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-11 Thread Casey Duncan

Cees de Groot wrote:
 
 Shane Hathaway [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
 That's one reason ZODB is so nice.  You can write an application without
 writing a formal schema.
 
 One of the reasons I am seriously considering to migrate our production
 database from PostgreSQL to ZODB. I am about to implement our product
 database, and it is just too darn complex to bother maintaining SQL tables for
 it...
 
 Actually OracleStorage and bsddbstorage, recently released, are designed
 to address concerns about performance and reliability, and they do an
 excellent job at it.  And I consider ZODB as real an OODB as anything
 else.  (In some ways it's the best out there IMHO.)
 
 I heard that OracleStorage was quite a bit slower? And from what I've seen
 from FileStorage, it's a basic transaction log - what can be more reliable
 than that?
 
 Are people using ZODB for non-Zope data? I'd be very interested to discuss
 things like emulating extents, patterns for indexing, etcetera...
 

One of the biggest limitations in my mind is the lack of a general query
language for the ZODB like what you get with most OODBMS and all RDBMS.
ZCatalog is improving, but it is just not quite there yet.

I do feel that the ZODB is quite robust, and with the added option of
berkeley storage along with others, you have several back-end choices.

-- 
| Casey Duncan
| Kaivo, Inc.
| [EMAIL PROTECTED]
`--

___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-11 Thread David Brown

At 11:45 AM 5/11/2001 -0600, Casey Duncan wrote:

One of the biggest limitations in my mind is the lack of a general query
language for the ZODB like what you get with most OODBMS and all RDBMS.

I used to think this as well.

But isn't Python a decent query language?  Isn't it nice to be able to have 
all of the facilities of Python at your disposal when manipulating data, 
rather than hoping that whatever database you are using doesn't have a 
brain-damaged implementation of SQL?

Isn't it nice not to have to convert back and forth between SQL types and 
native types?  Isn't it nice not to have to swap in your SQL mind in the 
middle of your Python program?

Having a general query language makes it easy for people who know that 
particular general query language to write programs.  It makes it easy to 
access a bunch of different data sources, at least until the monster named 
implementation differences rears it's ugly head.

We've all spent years learning to make our programs interface with 
databases, learning how to jump the mental chasm between our programs and 
they way they want to manipulate data, and the way that the database wants 
to manipulate data.  Isn't it nice not to have to do that any more?

Don't get me wrong, I believe I get your point.  SQL implementations are 
getting more and more compatible.  There are OODBMS query languages 
specified.  There's no really good way of making different programming 
languages and programming environments interoperate without some sort of 
common meeting ground, like a general query language.

And perhaps I'm overdoing the response, perhaps I've gone off in a 
different direction.  I've just been thinking about this quite a bit lately.

dave


___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-11 Thread Joachim Werner

 But isn't Python a decent query language?  Isn't it nice to be able to
have
 all of the facilities of Python at your disposal when manipulating data,
 rather than hoping that whatever database you are using doesn't have a
 brain-damaged implementation of SQL?

Most of the time nobody will need SQL. And having a transparent,
transaction-aware and undoable persistent Object store is really a cool
thing. But from time to time you will hit walls. That's when the object
paradigm just does not do the job completely well any more. E.g. how would
you handle objects beloning to more than one container? In SQL this is easy
(Just have a table that matches key pairs from the container table and the
item table). And I don't know any good way of implementing many-to-many
relations in object hierarchies. Let alone querying them efficiently.

Joachim


___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-11 Thread David Brown

At 08:38 PM 5/11/2001 +0200, you wrote:

 E.g. how would
 you handle objects beloning to more than one container? In SQL this is easy
 (Just have a table that matches key pairs from the container table and the
 item table).

I could do the same thing with Python, creating a dictionary that does the 
mapping.  You'd have to maintain the dictionary, sure, but you'd have to 
maintain the table in a relational database as well.

  And I don't know any good way of implementing many-to-many
 relations in object hierarchies. Let alone querying them efficiently.

Well, then we need a many-to-many mapping object.  The point is that we 
could do this in Python and make the classes available, rather than 
morphing our thought processes into whatever shape the RDBMS wants.

We're just missing some functionality, but it can be written without 
rewriting the database code, because we can just store our objects 
(representing indices or mappings or whatever) directly.

The cool thing about object stores is that you can use the object modeling 
tools to do the job, and come up with specific (and more efficient) 
solutions, rather than mapping a general (and possibly slower) solution 
onto a specific problem.

dave


___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-11 Thread Cees de Groot

Joachim Werner [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
[...]. E.g. how would
you handle objects beloning to more than one container? In SQL this is easy
(Just have a table that matches key pairs from the container table and the
item table). And I don't know any good way of implementing many-to-many
relations in object hierarchies. Let alone querying them efficiently.

Probably I'm daft because it is Friday night, but AFAIK ZODB and most OODB's
store an object only once, keyed by its object id. The rest is just references
through that oid, so objects that belong to more than one container can be
added to all these containers and n:m relations are implemented by having a
list of objects on both sides. 


___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-10 Thread Tino Wildenhain

Hi shane,

I think the motivation people want an RDBMS storage beneth zodb is
because they understand RDBMSes these days are performant, relieable
and can quiete easy maintained.

I've seen Java implementations using this approach to achive persistens
using as example Powertier[tm] to explicit map oop data to an RDBMS.
I didnt like it because you have to map your objects each time you create
a class, keep in mind not to infere with others etc...

Would it not be better to improve the abilities of the Filestorage
to handle updates better? May be most of the storage system in C?
With logfiles like modern RDBMSes use to incorporate fast changes?
However, to avoid pickling/unpickling and may be to update on
attribute-change, we need the approach you mentioned.

What about using a real oodb for zope? Dont remember any particular
product name, but I heard something.

Regards
Tino Wildenhain


--On Donnerstag, 10. Mai 2001 12:39 -0400 Shane Hathaway 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Tino Wildenhain wrote:
  But storage of binary pickles was never the intention anyway.  I
  created a little interface that would allow you to store different
  classes in different PostgreSQL tables.  Before I got to implementing
  anything,

 Is this much like the ZPatterns approach?

 Which part of ZPatterns are you referring to?  The idea is to
 (generally) put all instances of a class in a certain table.  But the
 implementation details having nothing in common with ZPatterns.

 Or do we want to make some automatism to get tables created and destroyed
 according to ZClasses needs?

 I was thinking there would be a default table where everything gets
 stored by default.  A programmer then tells the ORMapping about specific
 classes and how to store them.

  So, if we have context, the relational mapping tree can work.  It would
  turn Zope into a purely relational application server, which a lot of
  folks apparently want.  ;-)

 Oh, do they? ;)
 Me dont :-)

 You know, it might be possible to get a team together to implement
 this.  How many out there would be interested in pursuing it further?
 IMHO it's not as much work as it sounds at first.  Zope being so
 object-oriented, you really can replace one of its most fundamental
 assumptions (an OODBMS) with something else (an RDBMS) without a huge
 effort.

 Shane





___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-10 Thread Shane Hathaway

Tino Wildenhain wrote:
 I think the motivation people want an RDBMS storage beneth zodb is
 because they understand RDBMSes these days are performant, relieable
 and can quiete easy maintained.

The other motivations for an RDBMS are (1) people have existing schemas
and want Zope to access the same data as their existing apps, and they
want it to be transparent, and (2) tables with millions of entries are
easily stored in Zope but the perception is that the catalog isn't as
fast as a database index.  No one has done any tests AFAIK.

 I've seen Java implementations using this approach to achive persistens
 using as example Powertier[tm] to explicit map oop data to an RDBMS.
 I didnt like it because you have to map your objects each time you create
 a class, keep in mind not to infere with others etc...

That's one reason ZODB is so nice.  You can write an application without
writing a formal schema.

 Would it not be better to improve the abilities of the Filestorage
 to handle updates better? May be most of the storage system in C?
 With logfiles like modern RDBMSes use to incorporate fast changes?
 However, to avoid pickling/unpickling and may be to update on
 attribute-change, we need the approach you mentioned.
 
 What about using a real oodb for zope? Dont remember any particular
 product name, but I heard something.

Actually OracleStorage and bsddbstorage, recently released, are designed
to address concerns about performance and reliability, and they do an
excellent job at it.  And I consider ZODB as real an OODB as anything
else.  (In some ways it's the best out there IMHO.)

Shane

___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )



Re: oodb philosophics ;) was: Re: [Zope-dev] Experiments with ORMapping

2001-05-10 Thread Casey Duncan

Tino Wildenhain wrote:
 
 Hi shane,
 
 I think the motivation people want an RDBMS storage beneth zodb is
 because they understand RDBMSes these days are performant, relieable
 and can quiete easy maintained.
 
 I've seen Java implementations using this approach to achive persistens
 using as example Powertier[tm] to explicit map oop data to an RDBMS.
 I didnt like it because you have to map your objects each time you create
 a class, keep in mind not to infere with others etc...
 
 Would it not be better to improve the abilities of the Filestorage
 to handle updates better? May be most of the storage system in C?
 With logfiles like modern RDBMSes use to incorporate fast changes?
 However, to avoid pickling/unpickling and may be to update on
 attribute-change, we need the approach you mentioned.
 
 What about using a real oodb for zope? Dont remember any particular
 product name, but I heard something.
 
 Regards
 Tino Wildenhain
 

It would certainly be an interseting exercise to put Matisse or
Objectivity behind Zope as ZODB storage, however I think there will
always be kludgeyness because features of Zope wont directly map (like
versions).

I think the Berkeley storage option will eventually prove to be the
ticket. Probably sooner than later.

How about XML storage! 8^) You think startup times are slow now...

-- 
| Casey Duncan
| Kaivo, Inc.
| [EMAIL PROTECTED]
`--

___
Zope-Dev maillist  -  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )