[freeside-devel] Does it work with Oracle?

[Matthew Goheen]

> On Fri, May 04, 2001 at 09:14:44AM -0400, Matthew Goheen wrote:
> > > I would like to know whether anyone has successfully implemented Freeside
> > > with an Oracle backend.
> > 
> > I started the process, and got through renaming all the various conflicting
> > column names, but time constraints made me abandon the project.
> > 
> > I don't really think there is much that actually has to be done, other than
> > getting familiar with the code (which is certainly the biggest obstacle).
> > The column names that I came up with include "uid" and "date" (and perhaps
> > "schema" and "comment"?).  I also renamed "gid", just to be consistant with
> > "uid" (I added "x_" to the names, just to make them easier for me to find,
> > using just an "_" was more confusing -- a la "_password").
> 
> "date" is already "_date".

Hmmm, must have been some other word....I can't remember now.

> "uid" is not an SQL reserved word according to etc/sql-reserved-words.txt
> in the distribution.  Neither is "schema" or "comment".  If you have a
> list of Oracle reserved words above and beyond standard SQL reserved
> words, I'd be interested in getting a copy.

Yes, well, all the Oracle "reserved" words I came across were simply errors
that Oracle generated when parsing SQL statements.  I don't have an Oracle
reserved word list, so it was simply trial and error.

> > At that point things didn't work, and I ran out of time.  I'd love to
> > see support
> > added... :-)
> 
> Other than the column names you'd also need to add support for Oracle to
> DBIx::DBSchema.  

Well, if I ever start up my efforts again, I'll know where to go next...

> It seems odd to me that people would expect to see support for a
> proprietary database added to a free software project.

Why not?  Perl has great support for Oracle, and has for years.

> If you have
> resources to purchase and run Oracle, sponsoring an Oracle port of
> Freeside would be insignificant by comparison.

We purchased Oracle back in 1995 (I believe) and maintained a maintenance
contract on it up until last year.  We have quite a bit of code now that
is tied to Oracle (although much of it uses DBI), so changing would be
difficult.  At any rate, we don't have the money we had back then, nor were
there as many viable choices for transactional databases....

> PostgreSQL is free and currently supported, and I've heard positive
> reports about MySQL with BDB support.

Yes, we want to move to PostgreSQL but the amount of work involved there,
as I mentioned, is large....

	- Matt Goheen