[Schevo-devel] Re: Benefits of schevo vs. traditional RDBMS

[Matthew Scott]

On 12/8/05, Patrick K. O'Brien <pobrien at orbtech.com> wrote:
> Tom Locke wrote:
> > ok - sounds good. And how about benefits vs. ODBMSs?
>
> [...]
>
> Schevo goes beyond those capabilities by providing structures that give
> you relational-like integrity, automatic indexing, a nice API for
> accessing database objects, transactions-as-objects (as opposed to
> transactions as milestones within procedural code), import/export
> capabilities, a mostly-declarative schema syntax, etc.

One way I like to look at it is a viewpoint that I've seen put into
thought pretty well by someone in Rails-land (forgot who or where) --
constraints beget creativity.   Schevo provides an additional set of
constraints on how you go about structuring your data, beyond what
ZODB and Durus provide out of the box.  The automation that Schevo
provides is a result of those constraints.

By working within those constraints, it becomes easier to know what
you can do and how you do it, and thus are able to come up with
creative solutions that exploit the constraints and the automation
that comes with them.

So, from that perspective, what Schevo provides (IMHO) is a
comfortable "room" (whose walls are those constraints) in which to
think about organizing and presenting data.  Not too big, not too
small, and with a nice set of amenities :)

For example, due to the way entities and extents work, and the fact
that Schevo confines you to that method of data organization, Schevo
is able to efficiently track object relationships behind the scenes. 
And as you've seen in recent threads, those same relationships open up
new opportunities to exploit them using a finely-tuned public API.

--
Matthew R. Scott