Chapter 13. Using Other Databases

Table of Contents

Position Overview
Oracle 10 and 11
Oracle Perl Driver
Oracle Php5 Driver

Position Overview

WACS currently works with two of the leading database backends - MySQL (version 5.x) and Oracle (versions 10g and 11i). That said, the usage of SQL by the WACS code is generally kept as generic as possible with, outside of the initial table creation steps, no code differences between what is used when talking to MySQL and when talking to Oracle. This should make the code sufficiently generic to work against just about any database that supports a full featured SQL interface via the DBI module for perl and the pearDB module for Php. Supporting a new database platform should be a simple matter of ensuring the appropriate DBI and pearDB modules for that database are available on the system and that the appropriate date types have been added to the conversion functions provided in the core WACS module.

The basic WACS package applications are designed to work with MySQL 5 and in fact in order to try to make WACS work Out Of The Box, they include dependencies on the MySQL 5 server code to ensure the necessary support is added. This does not mean that the packaged versions have to be used with MySQL only however; you can easily install an Oracle server as well and merely change a few entries in the wacs.cfg file and have it work just fine.