I should also mention that one of these large collections contains objects with sequential, 
but not consecutive, numeric ids (timestrings) like some blogs. Users of this database can b
enefit from the ability to access items added around the same time.

With or without a catalog, how would one get the next or previous id in such a case?

--- On Mon, 11/2/09, Andreas Jung <lists@[...].com>  wrote:

From: Andreas Jung <lists@[...].com> 
Subject: Re: [Zope] Large BTreeFolder2 batching/pagination
To: "Ken Ara" <feedreader@[...].com> 
Cc: zope@[...].org
Date: Monday, November 2, 2009, 11:36 AM

Am 02.11.09 11:28, schrieb Ken Ara:
>  I agree it is hard to imagine, but I am just the web guy...
> 
>  If I dare to guess, I would say that what they want to do is improve
>  access to the information for the users. The two million objects are
>  strongly interlinked, so this is the navigation system used up to now.
>  But why not open it up to browsing?
> 

Because no human can deal in a reasonable way with 500k object..build
your *own*
custom and working navigation throughout the data records...presenting
the ZMI view for BTreefolders to a human is just sick.
> 
>  For the content team, it might also be nice to use the ZMI or similar
>  when working with this content.
> 
>  We have not been successful to create a Catalog of this many objects.
>  The process seemed to time out after many hours, probably
>  hardware-bound. Also, the size of the resulting ZODB is of concern,
>  but we may try again with the Catalog on a mounted database.
> 
we have ZCatalogs with millions of objects..likely you are indexing
everything within one big transaction
without using savepoints or subtransactions..


> 
-aj