[freeside-devel] MSSQL

[Nathan Anderson]

Ivan Kohler wrote:

>

[snip]

Thanks for putting your thoughts down in writing.  We have at least
temporarily suspended our MSSQL port since our face-to-face convo last
week, and although I haven't had time to do so since we got back, we
plan to look at the existing support for making direct writes to an
external RADIUS database stored in the DBMS of our choice, which is
something that wasn't clear to us was already possible.  We have our
own proprietary schema and then we have Radiator (the RADIUS server we
use) call a stored procedure on the SQL server that returns the fields
that Radiator wants to see, so I'll need to dig in and see what changes
need to be made in Freeside to support this.

I still plan on pulling together the improvements and fixes that I made
to DBIx::DBSchema::DBD::Sybase and get them submitted to you, regardless
of what our ultimate decision about the fate of the Freeside MSSQL port
ends up being...since that Sybase driver already exists it seems like it
would be a shame for these fixes to go to waste, and maybe somebody else
will find them useful someday.

All of that said...

> To do that, we leverage more advanced database features over time.  In 
> the past, we didn't use transactions or foreign keys, now we do.  In the 
> future, we are considering making use of PostGIS.  And so on.
> 
> However, in contrast to MSSQL support, MySQL/MariaDB is open-source, was 
> supported recently, could probably be supported again without intrusive 
> changes, and could increase user/developer/customer interest in the 
> platform.

...I would suggest that use of PostGIS and support of MySQL are mutually
exclusive, and so accepting a full-featured MySQL port would necessarily
require you to go lowest-common-denominator in some places and thus go
against every argument you just made in favor of not supporting MSSQL.
:-)

That said, it's your project, and I understand and respect your thinking
behind this.

(I also suspect that some -- definitely nowhere near all, but some -- of
the changes I had to make in order to support MSSQL will be needed to
bring MySQL support back up to snuff again.  And if that prediction ends
up being true, then I guess win/win for us should we decide to maintain
our own fork with MSSQL support, since such a fork would benefit from
those changes.)

Thanks again,

-- 
Nathan Anderson
First Step Internet, LLC
nathana at fsr.com