The Cubulus project and Alexandru Toth 's page describe an "OLAP Aggregation Engine". It is very nice to see advanced work done on the dimensional model.

The cited research dates from 1999 (V. Markl, F. Ramsak, R. Bayer, "Improving OLAP Performance by Multidimensional Hierarchical Clustering", Proceedings of the Intl. Database …

After having written a number of application-specific object-relational mappers, I have been on the prowl for an elegant, enduring solution. I had started to come to grips with Django , and like much of the approach. Django has a tiny infrastructure feature (the settings.py file) which made it unpleasant to …

Python is a top-shelf toolset for creating sample data to do performance testing.

Let's say that you need to validate a data warehouse design, and you need a million facts that join with thousands of dimension entities across a half-dozen dimensions. You'll be generating data for seven different tables, and …

A stored procedure isn't really very easy to understand. There's a profound fascination with triggers and stored procedures, and they're both really bad ideas. I can't say enough bad things about stored procedures. See PL/SQL vs. Java - Which is REALLY faster? and Over-Solving the Problem or When your architect …

Actually, the code looks like a clever expansion on my example, in PyCon 2007 (Revised) .

"But wait," you say. "Creating a pivot table in Python?"

Of course. Spreadsheets can create pivot tables from dimensionally normalized data. However, getting the data in this form is often challenging and if there is …

In one form, the question is "How do we handle the [X] transaction in the warehouse?" Another form of the question is "What do we do when [Y] changes?" The third form is less clear, but essentially the same: "How do we maintain [Z] in the warehouse?"

All of these …

Simple object persistence (i.e., serialization to a file system) is what pickle, marshal and shelve do.

However, here's the next thing of some interest OODB's.

Zope's ZODB . The original OODB for Python, the backbone of Zope.

buzhug : "a fast, pure-Python database engine, using a syntax that Python programmers should …

Ian Bicking: A Blog http://blog.ianbicking.org/, provided some info on Py3K and Python Introspection http://blog.ianbicking.org/introspecting-expressions-in-py3k.html.

For me, the interesting part was his summary of Object-Relational Mapping. Mr. Bicking identifies two broad approaches: lambda introspection and operator overloading.

While some spread-sheet use is civilized numerical stuff, and other spread-sheet use is merely personal organization, too much spread-sheet use is the poor-person's database management system. I call it the Spreadsheet Schema (SSS), different from normalized relational schema and star schema.

There is a serious problems with people using spreadsheets …

Why Python? Stay tuned. Why Zope? More to come.

HTML Parse Tree and related material - needs a proper Python install script.

PyWeb - needs some updates and a proper install script.

Additional projects:

Random Number Test Algorithms, plus an implementation of some higher-order …