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
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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).

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CategoryPyCon2005