[DB-SIG] Persistent Storage of Objects

[Christopher Petrilli]

glinds - Greg Lindstrom [glinds@acxiom.com] wrote:

> I have been writing an application for volunteer fire departments
> and am to the point of designing a database.  I have read Joel
> Shprentz's paper Persistent Storage of Python Objects in Relational
> Databases (Proceedings of the 6th International Python Conference)
> and am wondering what is the "state of the art"?  The program I am
> writing is OO, so this seems method seems ideal for my application.

it depends, of course, on your application. Relational "models" are
always a shoe-horn fit for data, regardless of where it comes from.
Their benefit is that thy have an abstract mathmatical basis which
allows for interesting queries, etc. to be written with some adhoc
nature.   Having said this, sometimes object databases are better, all 
depending on what it is you're talking about doing.

> I have looked at Gadfly and mySQL; Gadfly wins because this must run
> on windows (no holy flames, please) and must be no cost to the
> departments.

Remember that Gadfly has no data types, and also needs ome C
extensions to run at a reasonable rate.  This however can be compiled
in.  Also, because it stores things in memory, you are constrained in
teh size of database that you can work with.  Having said that, I find 
it extreemly useful. 

> Are there examples out there (storage of objects), other than the
> one given in the back of the paper?  Has this concept (saving
> objects) become the status quo?

You might also look into the ZODBv3 that is under Zope, which is a
pure transactional object database.  There is no status quo in the
persistence field, it's too wide open.

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli
| petrilli@amber.org