[Spacewalk-list] RFE: Spacewalk to work with some open source database engine

[Mike McCune]

Alexander Todorov wrote:
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> Greetings,
> I saw that a requirement to install Spacewalk is having Oracle database. Behind
> that choice may be many good decisions which I don't know but being able to
> install with MySQL or PostgreSQL is a big plus IMO, even for the sake of testing
> where people would like to yum install instead of going to a 3rd party place,
> accept some agreement and then download bits.
> 
> Please point me to documentations if existing which describes a decision not to
> support other database engines.
> 
> Thanks,
> Alexander.

 From our FAQ:

https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/SpacewalkFaq

""Why do you use Oracle? Any plans for supporting other databases?

Originally the Spacewalk code base was used as a hosted application and 
Oracle was a good choice for a hosted application in 2001. Over the 
years open source databases such as Postgres and MySQL have improved 
tremendously in terms of stability, speed, and scalability. We have not 
had the resources allocated in the past to add support for an open 
source database but want to do so soon.""

As the FAQ says, it has been a question of resource and engineering 
effort required to support another database that stopped us from being 
able to get Spacewalk working on more than just Oracle.

We will be outlining on the wiki some plans of attack on what we need to 
do to the code to work with a FOSS DB.

Mike
-- 
Mike McCune
mmccune at redhat.com
Engineering               | Portland, OR
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