Well, lessee here. At PyCon in Dallas last week, here's what happened, from my perspective:

• I watched a number of talks.
• I did some drinking.
• I sprinted on ZODB "blob" support.

The sprinting was the most important part. The sprint topic of ZODB blob support is a holdover from last year's PyCon sprints. You can see the proposal for more info about what it means. We (myself and Christian Theune) fixed up most of the issues that were left hanging around since the last sprint, and essentially this work is now done.

I need to find time to package it and release ZODB with blob support as an alpha. I'm a little blocked on that right now, because I went down the diversionary path of eggifying the various packages that make up ZODB. This is a non-trivial effort. I've managed to package both the TimeStamp module and the WeakSet module, upon which several other logical packages depend, but this is as far as I've gotten.

In the meantime, if you want to check out ZODB with blob support:

• If you don't use Zope, you can check out the blob-merge-branch of ZODB.
• If you do use Zope, you can check out the blob-integration-test branch of Zope, which is essentially a copy of the Zope trunk with SVN exterals that point to the blob-merge-branch versions of all the right packages.

To get an idea of how to use blobs, take a look at the basic.txt doctest and the connection.txt doctest in the Blobs/tests package. The transaction.txt doctest is also useful if only for the example of how to set up a "BlobStorage" at the top of the module.