[Pythonmac-SIG] Gadfly SQL on Mac?

[Bob Savage]

Richard Gordon <maccgi@bellsouth.net>
> I just ran across Aaron Watters' Gadfly
> (http://www.chordate.com/kwParsing/gadfly.html) while looking for
> something else and am interested in playing with it, but thought I'd
> ask if anyone happens to know if this runs ok on Mac or not? Also,
> it's the only SQL engine that I've come across that seems to be
> entirely ram-based and while that should make it amazingly fast, I
> wonder how practical it would be to use unless you had hordes of
> memory to allocate to MacPython? Thanks.

Richard,

I did some work with Gadfly on my Mac this past year. I found it to run
perfectly fine with one caveat: eventually the in-RAM model came back to
bite me. I had four tables, each with about 35,000 rows which gave me an
out-of-memory error. I might have been able to tweak it so that it still
worked by dividing the databse up into four databases (one for each table)
but that would have limited my ability to fashion Queries on my data. Still
haven't come up with a good alternative. Also Aaron gave me an experimental
patch to use a B-tree lookup table, but, again, that really restricted my
ability to do queries (it worked great for "where somerow is 'something'"
type searches but not on inexact matches like greater than, or max, etc.)

I would say you should consider how much information you are going to throw
at it. If the number of total rows in the DB are going to approach (or
exceed) 140,000, you will probably need a different solution. If you can
structure your data so that it never gets near that amount, I would say
Gadfly is a pleasure to use.

Bob Savage