Patrick-
You might try out the Pointrel Data Repository System I wrote -- it's
all in Python.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
You need to learn to frame the data storage problem in its terms (triads
or somewhat Entity-Relation-al, similar in some ways to RDF). It does
provide single-user transactions using a lock file, but this lock file
approach has not been tested on lots of platforms. Compared to other
systems, you might find it less efficient in disk use (it now supports
64 bit offsets) and more difficult to delete thigns (the short answer
is, you can't delete anything -- without writing application level
support on top of it). On the plus side, you only need to add one
Python file to your project.
However, it does not yet have the level of testing yet one might want
for something mission critical. Naturally, how well suported it is is a
matter of chicken and egg -- if it is not well supported people won't
try it or improve it (until it magically makes it over some level of
general interest). For an example of its current bleeding edge state, I
just discovered what I think may be a potential bug where abandoned
transactions could create problems if you are using caching (the cache
could hold onto no longer valid handles for added new strings) -- I've
patched that for the next release (and you can always just turn off
caching), but that's the sort of bleeding edge thing you might encounter
if you try it. You can see the recent announcement of the latest version
in comp.lang.python.announce.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&th=6de75a999a0ca969&rnum=3
Or this recent post:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...-8&[email protected]&rnum=5
I can say that I'd be interested in making the Pointrel Data Repository
a stable and well supported popular platform, although I won't commit to
any specific time frame or level of effort for it. I think it would be
more ready to go when or if I make the transition to using it to store
all my email (gulp -- that's commitment!
But that hasn't happened
yet. I'm thinking of using it in a web proxy first as that's a little
more forgiving application area for me (but the issues of making a good
proxy are stalling that some).
A year or two or so back I looked at the Gadfly source with a notion of
using some of it to put a SQL front end onto Pointrel. Maybe that would
make it more apalatable for general use? But I'm not generally
interested in using SQL, so I'm not sure how far down that road I want
to go.
In any case, all the best. And the databases written in C might be worth
your exploration -- some of the appear to be quite good and fairly cross
platform in their own terms.
--Paul Fernhout
