[Koha-devel] Adding support for PostgreSQL, no new MySQLisms, please

[Marc Balmer]

Dear Koha-Devels,

during the Marseille Hackfest 2012 I started together with Stephane and
Christophe from BibLibre to add support for the PostgreSQL database.
The ultimate goal of this work is that Koha can run on a PostgreSQL
server as as good as it does now on a MySQL server.

This mostly boils down to removing the MySQLisms in the current code,
which I am currently doing.  The collect-all-activity bug for this is
7365, it holds dependencies to the individual bugs like 7802, 7806 etc.
(more to come, obviously).  There is also a wiki page
wiki.koha-community/wiki/PostgreSQL which I update frequently.

This work also means that you must not add new MySQLisms in new code.
Especially don't use backuotes in column names, write

INSERT INTO foo (bar) VALUES (42);

instead of

INSERT INTO foo(`bar`) VALUES (42);

For more idioms, consult above mentioned Wiki page, and if in doubt you
can contact me, I am always willing to help with database issues.

And please be advised that adding MySQLisms in new code will fail in QA.

Thanks for your cooperation!  If all goes well, this work should be
concluded in a few months (but we are not in a hurry).

- Marc Balmer