baalbek wrote: > CAD systems available today (Autocad, Archicad, Architectural Desktop, > etc) have one huge flaw: they don't store data to a SQL database, but to > binary files.
There's a reason for this. Most CAD data is not in a form (First Normal Form) suitable for a relational database. In addition, the sheer number of objects involved in each operation brings performance to its knees. Finally, most RDBMS provide (and are optimized for) transactional semantics -- for a CAD system, this is wasted overhead. People dabbled in this years back but quickly discovered just how different they are. If you have access to it, you should take a peek at the source for the OpenAccess database. Although this is for chips, I suspect some of the same design principles would go into designing a CAD database. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list