On 20 November 2003, Michael Watkins said:
> Python DBAPI is pretty low level, compared to what many Python - SQL
> developers work with - prefering some sort of Object Relational mapping
> such as Cucumber or ORM or others. And sometimes no RDBMS is involved at
> all - i.e. the use of an object "database" such as ZODB.

As a completely off-topic aside, I must strenuously object your use of
quotation marks there -- it seems to me that you're implying either that
object databases are not "real" databases, or that ZODB is not a "real"
database.

Au contraire, there's nothing particularly special about the relational
model except that some database geeks in the 70s worked out a
theoretical framework that means they can use Greek letters to prove
theorems about databases.  Good for them.

In the real world, what people care about are the ACID properties:
atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.  Expensive commercial
relational databases (eg. Oracle, Sybase) generally provide all four
properties, and free relational databases (eg. MySQL) often do not.
There's nothing intrinsic to the object model that says object databases
cannot provide all four properties; I believe that the expensive
commercial object DBs (eg. Poet, Versant) do, and I know that ZODB does
not.  (It definitely provides atomicity and isolation through its
transaction mechanism; durability is there, but based on the mailing
list traffic I've seen, probably not 100% bug-free yet; consistency is
what's missing, since ZODB does as much type-checking as Python does --
ie. none.)

I'm with Jim Fulton in this one -- he habitually refers to relational
databases as "stupidbases".  ;-)

        Greg
--
Greg Ward                          http://www.gerg.ca/
Everybody is going somewhere!!  It's probably a garage sale
or a disaster Movie!!