[Setup] Re: Plone questions

akameswaran akameswaran at gmail.com
Wed Dec 13 19:34:45 UTC 2006


For the database thing, you might be better off looking into Zope
groups.  There will be better information for your query there.  This
is about the best advice I can give for looking into db access as it is
really more driven by the Zope layer.  Below is my experience with a
short project that did use SQL access.

I think the situation has improved recently, but about a year ago I was
putting together a Plone based application that really needed
relational style data.
Plone/Zope use an object database by default, but the nature of the
data outside certain group, user and personalization was much more
suited to relational databases.
The solution was to simply use python database drivers and manage the
SQL data querying etc myself - yet still use the ZODB for managing
users, groups, etc.
At the time there were products for Zope available that would help
replace ZODB in it's entirety with a SQL database - but I didn't really
play with them much.

This odd architecture with 2 data-sources really wasn't as hard to
maintain as it seemed as there was a clear encapsulation of the
functionality that required SQL access, versus ZODB access.

A quick summary of my experiences with this type of problem:
1) Database drivers for python exist to facilitate using relational
databases
2) I believe (don't know) that the state of option for using relations
db's instead of ZODB has improved
3) Your still going to be basically on your own for writing the data
access layer for items that do not neatly fit into the archetypes
model.

And FYI- the app I did this in, never went into production - for
business rather than technical reasons.  But it does mean I'm not sure
how well that architecture would actually perform and scale in the real
world.




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