Forum OpenACS Q&A: DB2 and OpenACS

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Posted by David Wu on
Hi,

I'm interested in having OpenACS work on top of DB2 and I'm wondering
if OpenACS currently supports it.  If not, does anyone know basically
what needs to be done to enable it to work with DB2?  Is it a huge
task?  Thanks.

David

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Posted by Dan Wickstrom on
We're currently in the process of porting acs to work with both oracle and postgresql as a data-base back-end. It' a fairly large task as acs 4.x is highly dependent on an extensive set of pl/sql procedures. You can look at our current status to get an idea of how it's going.

Essentially, you have to convert the pl/sql procdeural language api and the data-model to work with db2, and you would need to extract and port the db2-specific queries from the .tcl scripts. SQL92-specific queries have already been ported, so your work would be alot less than what we've encountered when porting to postgresql. In addition, making it work with db2 would be somewhat easier, as we've laid the foundation for openacs to work with multiple db's, by adding a query-dispatcher and modifying the package manager to work with multiple db's.

It would be interested in hearing if anybody else would be interested in doing a port to db2, though it might be better to wait until we're done porting openacs to work on oracle and postgresql. That way you'll have a better chance of getting more volunteers to help out.

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Posted by Talli Somekh on
David,

Is there a particular reason you want to use DB2? I'm only curious because I've heard good things about it and would like to know if there are features in DB2 that make it particularly interesting.

talli

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Posted by Ciaran De Buitlear on
I wonder if this was ever done or if anyone is using Openacs with DB2. I am especially interested in this as I now work in IBM on a team responsible for enabling Oracle to DB2 migrations. Recent changes in DB2 have made this kind of migration much easier http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=167786 . Arguably recent price hikes from Oracle have made this type of migration more likely!
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Posted by Claudio Pasolini on
I built some OpenACS applications (based on PostgreSQL) that read and write an external DB2/400 database using the StarSQL driver.

It works.