Programming Python, 3rd Edition

The ZODB Object-Oriented Database

ZODB, the Zope Object Database, is a full-featured and Python-specific object-oriented database system. ZODB can be thought of as a more powerful alternative to Python’s shelves. It allows you to store nearly arbitrary Python objects persistently by key, like shelves, but it adds a set of additional features in exchange for a small amount of extra interface code.

ZODB is an open source, third-party add-on for Python. It was originally developed as the database mechanism for web sites developed with the Zope system described in Chapter 18, but it is now available as a standalone package. It’s useful outside the context of Zope as a general database management system in any domain.

Although ZODB does not support SQL queries, objects stored in ZODB can leverage the full power of the Python language. Moreover, in some applications, stored data is more naturally represented as a structured Python object. Table-based relational systems often must represent such data as parts scattered across multiple tables, associated with keys and joins.

Using a ZODB database is very similar to Python’s standard library shelves, described in the prior section. Just like shelves, ZODB uses the Python pickling system to implement a persistent dictionary of persistent Python objects.

In fact, there is almost no database interface to be found—objects are made persistent simply by assigning them to keys of the root ZODB dictionary object, or embedding them in objects stored ...