Re: PackageDB progress

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 21:29 -0500, Elliot Lee wrote:
>  
>  On Nov 26, 2006, at 5:20 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>  
>  
>  > 4) While working on the schema, I've become a bit less enamoured
>  > with
>  > SQLObject.  It seems to make easy things easy and hard things
>  > difficult
>  > to impossible.  For instance, there doesn't seem to be a way to
>  > specify
>  > multi-field primary keys (or multi-field unique constraints which
>  > would
>  > do almost as well.) 
>  
>  
>  From the docs:
>  "SQLObject does not support primary keys made up of multiple columns
>  (that probably won't change). It does not generally support tables
>  with primary keys with business meaning -- i.e., primary keys are
>  assumed to be immutable (that won't change)."
>  
>  
>  (And I happen to agree with their reasoning behind this
>  decision...) Doing unique constraints is easy enough, though:
>  
>  
>  class Foo:
>  firstName = StringCol(length=30)
>  lastName = StringCol(length=40)
>  firstLastIndex = DatabaseIndex('firstName', 'lastName', unique=1)
>   
Cool.  Just a documentation issue then.  (Should have remembered to look
under the Index documentation).

>  
>  Are there any other specific issues that you had with SQLObject?
>   
It's possible that it's just documentation disorganization.  Since
I've
started working with SQLAlchemy I've forgotten details of other problems
I had with SQLObject.  I'll have to go back and try to work with
SQLObject again.

>  
>  I don't know SQLAlchemy, but I suspect that for now the "devil you
>  know" is better than the "devil you don't". Or maybe I haven't
> run
>  into the real-world problems that you have with your schema :)
>   
Not sure :-)  SQLAlchemy made it quick to figure out what I wanted to
do.  Coupled with the remarks on the TurboGears mailing list about
SQLAlchemy vs SQLObject, I've gotten the impression that SQLObject isn't
flexible enough to solve all our problems.  I'm not sure that  SQLObject
is truly not up to handling what I want to do or if I'm just not reading
the SQLObject documentation carefully enough, though.  The packageDB
schema is complex enough to be a good test of both ORMs so I'll test the
new TurboGears with both SQLObject and SQLAlchemy on a subset of the
packageDB to see what turns up.

>  
>  I think calling Brew a packageDB is a bit of a stretch. From what I
>  recall, yes, it can track who owns what packages (and the packageDB
>  schema I originally suggested was based in part on the brew-style
>  schema :). However, the packageDB has a lot more community-only stuff
>  that just wasn't thought of in the brew world. The best end result
>  would probably be had by continuing the packageDB work, and merging
>  that functionality onto brew when appropriate. 
k.  Jesse let FESCo know that if Brew became opensource, it would come
with its own packageDB but we didn't get full details of what's in the
schema.  I'd love to see what brew has to see how it addresses the new
requirements (like subcollections).  But I can continue to work on the
standalone packageDB and then we can merge and modify things as
appropriate.

-Toshio