Re: Request for assistance/advice: TikiWiki CMS/Groupware will have to drop PostgreSQL support soon unless a maintainer steps up

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 12:29 AM, Marc Laporte <marclaporte@tikiwiki.org> wrote:
> Tiki uses a database abstraction layer so it can be used with many
> databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, SQLite) in addition to MYSQL.
> However, support for anything but MySQL has become more & more
> problematic. It's not strictly a chicken & egg problem because Tiki
> once worked with non-MYSQL. However, without maintainers, it was lost
> over time.

I'm guessing one of the painful things you deal with is maintaining
the create and upgrade DDL scripts for all those platforms. I've done
this in the past (years ago now, thankfully) for several
database-independent products. It's not fun.

I'm the lead developer on Power*Architect, an open source data
modeling tool that lets you develop your data model in a
platform-independent and visual way, then "forward engineer" to
several platforms (from your list, we support PostgreSQL, Oracle, and
MySQL--Sybase and SQLite support would need a bit of work). You could
use this to generate both create and upgrade scripts for all the
supported platforms.

I hope this can help you argue to keep PostgreSQL support. With a
platform-independent data model, supporting multiple platforms is much
easier. I've done the switch from hand-coded SQL to platform
independent visual modeling on real projects, so I could give a bit of
advice about how to approach the problem if any of the tikiwiki
developers are interested in trying it!

-Jonathan