ZODB

The Zope Object Database (ZODB) is an object-oriented DBMS library for storing Python objects. ZODB aims to provide a transparent way for Python programmers to make their data persistent. It is completely written by Python, and only provides Python API. It does not support other programming languages.

ZODB stores data as objects, and the relationship between objects are automatically maintained by Python object references. As a result, ZODB allows programmers to manage data structures with complicate relationships.

The storage layer of ZODB is pluggable, and there are three main implementations: ZOE, NOE, and RelStorage. ZOE is a single-server client-server framework using FileStorage; NOE extends ZOE to distributed-server client-server storage; RelStorage stores objects in a relational database, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle.

ZODB uses aggressive caching. As a result, it is not suitable for tasks with heavy writes. Also, ZODB is designed for mapping access through keys and attributes of objects, which means that it does not support queries containing joins and advanced search.

History

ZODB was a commercial project dated back to the late 90s, and was made open source as ZODB1 in 2002. It quickly upgraded to ZODB2 and then to ZODB3 in the same year, 2002. ZODB3 lived until 2012, and then the developers decided to rebuild it into ZODB4 using 100% Python. ZODB4 is the current version and is active. ZODB was born as a part of the Zope web application server, but it now stands alone and can be used independently.

Checkpoints

Not Supported

ZODB does not provide ckeckpoint API.

Data Model

Object-Oriented

Compression

Naïve (Page-Level)

The default storage implementation FileStorage does not compress the data. It simply appends object to the end of a file. However, there is an optional layer which uses gzip to compress the file in the FileStorage. Also, since ZODB has a pluggable storage layer, it also can support compression by using different storage layers such as NEO and relStorage. RelStorage supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle backend.

ZODB Logo
Website

http://www.zodb.org/

Source Code

https://github.com/zopefoundation/ZODB

Tech Docs

http://www.zodb.org/en/latest/reference/index.html

Developer

Zope Foundation

Country of Origin

US

Start Year

2009

Project Type

Open Source

Written in

Python

Supported languages

Python

Licenses

Zope Public License

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zope_Object_Database