[Dev] ZODB is not a Storage Technology (Re: other formats )

[Kevin Altis]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeremy Hylton
>
> I wonder how appropriate Berkeley DB is for end user applications.
> Running a Berkeley database entails a lot of management responsibility
> -- checkpointing, log management, recovery, deadlock detection, etc.
> It's a database, and running a database requires some database
> administration.
>
> The cost of administration is a drawback for any database.  I imagine
> that Chandler would want to minimize the amount of administration an
> end-user needs to do.  The ZODB storage with the least administrative
> costs is FileStorage, which works much like you describe -- append
> arbitrary objects to a single file.  It needs to be packed
> occasionally; pack is the operation that removes old revisions of
> objects.
>
> The BerkeleyDB storage for ZODB is still experimental, but it's
> intended more for server-side environments where there's a sysadmin on
> hand to properly manage the database.

Unless there is a major downside to using DirectoryStorage, I think it might
be preferable to FileStorage. In the first release or two of Chandler, it
would probably simplify tracking down any storage related bugs too. It may
also simplify synchronization, if in fact, it is legal to do file
synchronization of objects stored with DirectoryStorage?

http://www.zope.org/Members/htrd/DirectoryStorage

Jeremy or some other ZODB expert can elaborate on DirectoryStorage and
provide more background links.

Given that hundreds of megabytes for email, attachments, not to mention
calendaring, etc. will be quite common, I'm not particularly thrilled about
having all of that data in a single file, that is one of things I definitely
don't like about Outlook's .PST file. It is a simple matter to package up a
directory of data for archives.

ka