Wacs makes very extensive use of a relational database backend in organising and storing data about it's collection of images and video clips. Its primary method of access to this data is via the perl generic database access driver, DBI, and its respective lower layer drivers for specific databases such as DBD::Oracle for Oracle 10 and DBD::MySQL for MySQL 5. The matching routines for PHP, from the PEAR collection, are used to provide the same functionality for WacsPHP apps.

At no point in the code is a different SQL request made upon the basis of the underlying database being used, so the code is theortically portable to any other relational database with an appropriately complete implementation of SQL. That said, without making additional arrangements with the authors, only MySQL and Oracle are supported and routinely tested. If porting to an alternative database platform, the most likely issues are to do with the representations of dates within the system.