Chapter 14. Using Other Databases

Table of Contents

Position Overview
Oracle 10, 11, 12, 18 and 19
Oracle Perl Driver
Oracle Php5 Driver
Oracle PHP7 driver
PostgreSQL Version 12 and 13
PostgreSQL Installation Basics
Enabling Network Operation In PostgreSQL
Other PostgreSQL issues

Position Overview

WACS currently works with four of the leading database backends - MySQL (version 8.x), MariaDB (version 10.x), Oracle (versions 10g, 11i and 12) and PostgreSQL (12.x,13.x). For MariaDB use the specialised packages for first preference but you can also just install as if it were MySQL and modify it from there. 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 pear DB and/or PDO 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. We have already started to look at adding support for Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL in a future release.

The basic WACS package applications are designed to work with MySQL 8, MariaDB 10 or PostgreSQL 13 - just select the appropriate package and the rest is done for you. In fact in order to try to make WACS work Out Of The Box, they include dependencies on the MySQL 8 server code to ensure the necessary support is added. If you want to use PostgreSQL instead, look for a separate wacs-for-psql package instead of the main wacs package - it will pull in all the same other wacs packages but with PostgreSQL dependencies instead of MySQL. There is also a version that includes the MariaDB dependencies for Linux Distributions that include those. This does not mean that the packaged versions have to be used with the named DB 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.