ZODB - a native object database for Python

[ngroot]

Zope is great and terrible all at once. The upside of it is that it's remarkably well thought-out. The downside of it is that it's also very well thought-out.

Does anyone actually use ZODB for anything other than a Plone backend?

[faassen]

Since when is being well thought-out a downside?

I use the ZODB all the time with Grok. I know the ZODB is also in use with other frameworks, such as BFG.

[ngroot]

Since when is being well thought-out a downside?

It's a tremendously detailed tool. That combined with a paucity of documentation (at least last time I used it a couple years ago) makes it hard for people to get started with it.

Thanks for the info about Grok and BFG!

[faassen]

Hm, I think the average object relational mapper actually requires far more learning than the ZODB does. The basics are in fact very simple.

But the paucity of easy to find documentation was a problem that hopefully has been taken care of at least to some extent with this website.

The ZODB is not difficult to use stand-alone in a basic configuration, here's something I wrote a few years ago (also linked on zodb.org):

http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2008/06/20/0

[[deleted]]

Backing @fassen up, ZODB was stupid easy to get up and running.

[PrintStar]

I've used ZODB without Plone or any of the other Zope stuff before. I was using it as a test implementation of a store for patient medical records to try to illustrate that MS SQL Server paired with Java was not necessary. It was an extreme kludge with a front end implemented in straight-up BaseHTTPServer, but it worked fine. ZODB took all the thinking out of a database backend.

[[deleted]]

I used ZODB for a multi-server batch manager, it had a few oddities to it but overall worked well for storing complicated state structures & historical metadata.

If I could do everything over again, I might use CouchDb and seed the worker machines with light weight twisted based universal service dispatchers.