[freeside-devel] Does it work with Oracle?

[ivan]

On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 08:04:15AM -0400, Matthew Goheen wrote:
> > 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.

Would you check the documentation available to you with your database and
see if you can't dig anything up?

> > > 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.

Don't let me discourage you or anyone else from working on it if that's
what you want to do.  I was mostly reacting to your statement that you had
no time to contribute to make it happen, but you'd like to see support
added.  It's not going to happen unless you or someone else contributes or
sponsors it.

> > 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....

For your legacy systems, perhaps, but since you're not yet using Freeside,
there is no migration cost to start with PostgreSQL.

-- 
meow
_ivan