Let's work on making ZODB better!

Leader: Tim Peters

Jim Fulton will present the ZODB architecture as a basis for work. This will be a good opportunity to learn about many of the nitty-gritty details of ZODB.

There are many things we could work on, including:

• Adding interfaces (what exactly are the public APIs? it's become muddy) PROGRESS: Christian Theune made a good start at this; more is needed.

• Database iteration (e.g., iterate over all the objects of class Foo; there's no efficient way to do this now, especially when using ZEO). PROGRESS: A FileStorage iterator was implemented. Still needed: other storages; ZEO; more usable API on Connections.

• Multi-database support, http://zope.org/Wikis/ZODB/MultiDatabases. PROGRESS: A simpler of version of this proposal was implemented. Still needed: work on Zope to use this, and to stop monkey-patching ZODB internals.

• Deprecate get_transaction() officially. PROGRESS: done for ZODB 3.4, and all ZODB code using it (test suites and tools) changed to stop using it. Zope trunks (2.8 and 3) have been cleaned up to match.

• Blob support. PROGRESS: Enormous progress on this was made, primarily by Christian Theune and Chris McDonough. See the zodb-dev mail list for some detailed status reports and timings. The code is in ZODB/branches/ctheune-blobsupport/.

• Documentation
• Bug fixes
• Code cleanup
• Saner tests
• Savepoints
• Getting rid of versions

• Conflict resolution redesign. Possiblities: make it optional, make it pluggable, use a registry of class->resolution code instead of methods, get it off the ZEO server?

Note that to be able to make code contributions, you must be a Zope contributor: http://dev.zope.org/Subversion Note that you don't have to be a Zope user to be a Zope contributor. You don't have to be a Zope contributor either to participate in working out (and writing up) proposals for things ZODB could/should be doing better.

If you plan to participate, please put your name below, and, if you won't be there all 4 days, indicate which days you plan to be there.

Participants:

• Tim Peters (Sat, Sun, Mon, Tue)
• Christian Theune (All days)
• Jim Fulton (perhaps intermittently)
• Cameron Laird: will likely arrive late Saturday afternoon; is willing to work on documentation; and has lots of interest both in Zope and in OODBMSs generally.

• Chris McDonough (Sat, Sun)

If you don't sign up, you can still come and participate. The sign up is to give us an idea who will be there.

ChrisMcDonough says

We seem to have a nascent idea about working on ZODB "blob" suppport for at least some period of time during this sprint... for details, see http://www.plope.com/Members/chrism/zodb_blob_proposal

Other minor things:

• - Make ZEO server write a pidfile so we can rotate its logs by sending an appropriate
  • signal.
  - Come up with a Wiki page somewhere that details how to check stuff into ZODB without
  • making Tim's life a nightmare. But Tim thinks this is

    pretty hopeless

  - Allow ZEO clients to query the active ZEO server for its system clock value
  • (useful for synchronization).

CategoryPyCon2005