Database experiences in Python: Good or Bad?

[David Rushby]

"Brad Clements" <bkc at Murkworks.com> wrote in message news:<3d57f564$1_7 at goliath.newsgroups.com>...

> I am in the middle of "making the switch" to SAPDB.
...
> So .. I still haven't tried it with Zope yet, hopefully later today

  What's the status of ZsapdbDA?  It appears to have been unmaintained
for quite a while.  However, since ZsapdbDA is "derived from
ZOracleDA/ZMySQLDB" and based on SAP's official, mature Python
modules, perhaps the initial version was stable enough?

  It makes little difference to me in any case, since I'm in the
process of abandoning Zope in favor of WebWare.  I spent a lot of time
trying to love Zope, but at the end of the day it strikes me as
profoundly unPythonic in that it burdens the programmer with layer
upon quirky layer of complexity rather than stepping politely out of
the way and allowing the programmer get down to business, as Python
does.  Zope is certainly not devoid of cool ideas, but on balance it
proved to be more trouble than it was worth for me.

> 1. If SAP works for me, I'll drop Interbase/Firebird. So, maybe I can pass
> maintenance of gvIB on to you?

  I'm not motivated to maintain gvib, because at this point
kinterbasdb has a considerably broader feature set, and is better
optimized (especially in its blob handling).  I've scratched many of
my own itches as I've worked on kinterbasdb, especially with regard to
"extra" features that I need but that are not part of the Python DB
API, such as database event notification, programmatic database
create/drop, Services API support (clean, programmatic support for the
administrative stuff one would otherwise do by scripting command-line
utils), choice between convenient and precise fixed-point
representation, and so on.  Not all of those features have made their
way into the documentation or an official release yet, but I use them,
and have placed them in SourceForge CVS in anticipation of kinterbasdb
3.1.

> 2. If SAP works for me, and you eventually need scalability, maybe you'll
> drop kinterbasdb and move to SAP?

  In the near future, I probably won't need scalability greater than
that which Firebird can offer.  If I eventually begin to use SAPDB,
I'll probably continue to use Firebird in some roles, and will
certainly continue to maintain kinterbasdb.