On Feb 27, 2008, at 10:03 AM, Sean Allen wrote:
On Feb 27, 2008, at 5:33 AM, Laurence Rowe wrote:
Sean Allen wrote:
been looking for anything along those lines.
in particular, strategies and gotchas for how to store objects.
everything i've found is basically just a single type of object
being stored.
i'm really interested in tutorials and information on the best
ways to setup
large complicated hierarchies and all the various gotchas etc.
anything like that exist?
A good jumping off point is the wiki: http://wiki.zope.org/ZODB/Documentation
The beauty of using the ZODB is that it really makes no difference
whether you are storing homogeneous or heterogeneous hierarchies of
objects.
If you are likely to have a large number of objects in any one
folder then make sure it is BTree based. This is a scalable data
structure, so the whole list does not have to be loaded into memory
to access a single child object.
Been over that. Still have serious questions. And yes, we have a
large number of objects, something in the area of 16 million at
present if you were to map each relational table row to an object.
The biggest concern I have is how do to the layout/storage so that
this slightly contrived example works:
Product has a brand.
There are many brands.
How do I store so that I can find all products simply and all brands
simply and also so that changes in a brand instance are reflected when
the product instance is deserialized. By 'simply' I mean that it
doesnt really work on our end to have to walk all Products looking
for unique brands. Should just be able to go directly in and get
said brands ( using keys() or similar call ).
If I create 'brand' and 'product' as btrees, then if i do something
like
some_product.brand.name = 'something entirely different'
and that brand already exists in 'brand', would it be updated? are
references maintained in that fashion?
do we have to handle manually on update and creation?
Note that we would just be using ZODB not Zope in this scenario.
Back references are not maintained automatically.
I'd identify two classic solutions to this sort of thing.
One is to make a custom mapping (using a BTree as the inner data
structure) that maintains back-references when objects are placed in
them or removed. zope.app(.container? .folder? I'd have to look) has
code that does this, along with firing events. For simple stories
like the one you describe here, that's what I'd probably recommend.
It works to the strengths of the ZODB, which particularly shines in
terms of readability when you just need to walk a tree of attributes
to get what you want.
The other is to keep an external index, a la zc.extrinsicreference or
zc.relation.
zc.extrinsicreference does not have too many dependencies beyond ZODB,
and as long as zope.app.keyreference doesn't drag much along with it,
might be usable as a library. That said, it's also very simple, and
could be used as a model for you, even if you don't use it directly.
It would also be a reasonable choice for a simple situation like the
one you describe. It relies on events to update its data structures.
zc.relation an almost-released-revision of zc.relationship that
drastically reduces dependencies--actually, it has no additional
dependencies to ZODB, as you can see at http://svn.zope.org/zc.relation/trunk/setup.py?view=markup
. It's also a bit overwhelming and low-level: see the README: http://svn.zope.org/zc.relation/trunk/src/zc/relation/README.txt?view=auto
. It doesn't hook anything up for you: you set the relationship
catalog up and you arrange for it to be updated, via events or direct
messages. That said, if you need its power, it is well-tested and
would be a good choice for some jobs from at least some perspectives
(caveat read-or: I'm the author).
HTH
Gary
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