eGenix.com is pleased to announce the availability of our new high performance and professional quality ODBC Zope Database Adapter (Zope DA): the mxODBC Zope DA.

Introduction

The mxODBC Zope DA™ product allows you to easily connect your Zope installation or Plone CMS to just about any database backend on the market today, giving you the reliability of the commercially supported eGenix.com product mxODBC and the flexibility of the ODBC standard as middle-tier architecture.

mxODBC Zope DA works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and FreeBSD, providing you with the same interface, flexibility and robustness across all on all these platforms.

The mxODBC Zope DA implements thread-safe connection pooling and multiple physical connects per logical Zope connection. You can safely run Z SQL Methods in parallel, achieving a much better performance than other Zope database adapters under heavy load. This makes it ideal for deployment in ZEO Clusters and Zope hosting environments where stability and high performance are a top priority.

Using mxODBC Zope DA for Zope Database Applications

At EuroPython 2007, we gave a talk about Zope and relational database systems (RDBMS). The talk provides a high-level introduction on how Zope can be used for database web applications and where the mxODBC Zope DA can help. Please see our Presentations & Talks section for details.

mxODBC Zope DA for Zope 2.3 - 2.11 Database Applications

Features

• Zope Level 3 Database Adapter: the mxODBC Zope DA is fully multi-threaded and can handle multiple connections to multiple databases.

• Fully compatible to standard Z SQL Methods.

• Connection Pooling: physical database connections are pooled and kept open, to reduce the connection overhead to a minimum. This is especially important for high latency database connections and ones like Oracle which take a considerable amount of time to setup

• Parallel Execution of Queries on a single logical connection: the mxODBC Zope DA can manage any number of physical connections on a single logical connection. This enables running truly parallel Z SQL Method queries -- a feature not available in other Zope DAs.

• Zero Maintenance Mode of Operation: connections which are having temporary network problems are automatically reconnected as they become available again.
  

• Full Unicode Support: The Zope DA can communicate with the database using Unicode, 8-bit strings or a mix of the two. It provides automatic conversion as necessary to make it possible to adapt the database or the Zope application to the required needs.
• Full 64-bit Support: The underlying mxODBC 3.1 library fully supports 64-bit platforms such as Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 64-bit Linux systems that use iODBC or unixODBC.
• Compatible with all recent Zope and Python releases: Support for Zope 2.12 and later, Python 2.5 and 2.6. If you need support for older Zope releases, please use version 1.0.10 of our mxODBC Zope DA.
  

• Cross-platform Connection Objects: The Zope DA will automatically choose the right platform specific ODBC manager for you.

• Per Connection Adjustable ODBC Interface:

  mxODBC comes with many different subpackages to choose from on Unix. The Zope DA allows you to select these subpackages on a per-connection basis.

• Per Connection Error Handling: you can tell each connection whether it should report ODBC warnings or not; furthermore all warnings and errors are made available as list .messages on the DatabaseConnection object.

• Transaction-safe Automatic Reconnect:

  when the DA finds that a connection has timed out, it automatically tries a reconnect and replays the transaction on the connection (unlike other DAs which break the transaction scheme by doing a reconnect without replay).

• Built-in Schema Cache: this results in improved performance under heavy load.

• Database Schema Access:

  all ODBC catalog methods are made available for much better database schema inquiry. The catalog methods allow building generic database interrogation or manipulation tools and facilitates writing database independent Zope products.

• Native Support for Python data types: the Zope DA can optionally use Python datetime object, decimal objects in result sets to simplify integration. It also supports Zope's DateTime objects, mxDateTime objects, strings and tuples.
  

• Lazy Connect: the mxODBC Zope DA only connects to the database backends when a connection is actually requested. This results in a better use of resources compared to other Zope DAs.

• Fully compatible to the popular Znolk SQL Wizard Product and other similar products relying on the common database schema access methods .tables() and .columns().

More Information and Download

For more information please visit our website at www.egenix.com.

We have binary versions available for all Zope versions starting with 2.12, supporting Python versions 2.5 and 2.6, on all Zope platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and others.