Forum OpenACS Q&A: costs of multi-db support?

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Don, if PostgreSQL 8.0 had been released 4+ years ago I probably wouldn't be using Oracle at all, either. And, probably, if 8 or 9 years ago Illustra (PostgreSQL's uncle?) had worked half as well as PostgreSQL does now, Philip would never have even tried Oracle, and ACS and OpenACS never would have used it all!

But, fundamentally, why is supporting multiple databases so costly in OpenACS? And must it necessarily be so? (I suspect the answer is "mostly yes", but I am not at all sure.)

ACS 4.0 added the first hooks for multi-db support, but at the same time also made multi-db support harder by moving so much functionality into PL/SQL code. That seems rather ironic.

Lots of other projects claim to support every database under the sun, and even that doing so is easy. My impression however, is that most of those do so via dead-simple data models, and generally making trivial demands on the RDBMS. And thus presumably many of those applications pay an extremely heavy price for their "multi-RDBMS support", whether their authors realize that or not. (The cost is merely hidden under other accounts, like "can't scale" and "general suckiness".)

Considering alternate realities can be educational, sometimes. So, what I'm wondering about, is or was there some middle ground? Some way that, if you were hypothetically starting from scratch, you could get 80 to 90% of the RDBMS power goodness of OpenACS, while reducing the cost of multi-db support down to, say, 10% of what it is now?