eZ and Oracle

Wednesday 02 June 2010 1:51:54 pm

Last time I checked (around 2007 iirc), drupal had no db-access-layer at all. There was some chat going on about adding oracle support, but it was not a trivial task. The blog linked from the article you mention is dead...

On the eZ side:

• we have a full developed db access layer - on projects.ez.no a partner has published even a mssql connector!
• we have a fully working oracle connector, and we have had for a long time
• we have one of the most talented oracle coders in the php community, who matured experience participating to the adodb project, too (in case you do not get the joke: it's me!)
• we have paying customers on Oracle

Or where you asking for real technical aspects of creating a cms that is portable between dbs? That would take a much longer answer... The starting point to gleam some info would be to look into the code of the ezoracle extension. But I might have laying around a slide set used to teach oracle-style to mysql coders if you are interested.

Principal Consultant International Business
Member of the Community Project Board

Thursday 03 June 2010 1:35:52 am

While it is true that our oracle implementation is now well tested and supported, I think some of the issues raised in the linked article can't be ditched just like that.

The platform-neutral SQL part is one we have already discussed many times. Having an SQL language abstraction is one thing, data models and how each database is best used indeed is a complex matter. While our implementation works, and works fine, there is no doubt that the database schema isn't really optimized for Oracle. RDBMS "custom" features are mentioned here, and the abstraction indeed doesn't let us benefit from most of these specificities.

Regarding the database structure and oracle specific implementations, I think Gaetano has covered this up pretty correctly, thanks to his huge experience with oracle. There probably is room for improvement, but I think we're on the right track here.

Any comments on these specific points ?

Bertrand Dunogier
eZ Systems Engineering, Lyon
http://twitter.com/bdunogier
http://gplus.to/BertrandDunogier