22 July 2013, 5:21

I am considering migrating my Mahara from PostgreSQL to MySQL, as I'm more used to MySQL and it ties better with other systems we have (e.g. Moodle).

I'm not really that experienced with databases, so can anyone let me know benefits/disadvantages of each (it wasn't me who built it)?

Also, has anyone done this migration this way before? Know any good sites/steps for exporting/importing DB from one type to another? I was thinking of exporting tables as csv and reimporting to new DB, if I can't just straight dump from PostgreSQL and import tgat into new DB. Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance

30 July 2013, 1:20

Hello Wullie,

No answers to your questions, but some information for your decision making process. ;-)

We still recommend to run PostgreSQL for Mahara and as far as I know all large installations run on PostgreSQL.

For Mahara 1.8 we are implementing fulltext search and that will be only accessible to PostgreSQL for the time being. There are some changes that would be required to make it work for MySQL, but these were outside of the scope of the project.

We are using ElasticSearch which will require a Tomcat server to use this powerful search engine.

Maybe an idea to stay on PostgreSQL? ;-)

Cheers

Kristina

 

30 August 2013, 23:42

Hello Kristina,

some questions to your announcement about the upcoming mahara 1.8 release:

- will mahara 1.8 have the fulltext search function you mentioned?

- are there any plans to have these functionality also for mysql installations of mahara? &

- do I need to install a tomcat server for mahara 1.8?

I am asking because I plan to migrate mahara from mysql to postgresql.

Thanks & Greetings,

Michael

02 September 2013, 8:05

Hello Michael,

Thank you for your questions. Yes, we are planning to release Mahara 1.8 with fulltext search capabilities for sites that run a PostgreSQL database. The funding that we had received did not cover MySQL, but Aaron said it's problaby only about 1 more day to make triggers work in MySQL. That might be a better option to work on for 1.9 (and backport to 1.8, which shouldn't be too tricky esp. when done shortly after the 1.8 release because then the code hans't diverged much) than migrating a DB from MySQL to PostgreSQL. That will most likely take more time and also require much more testing. So if someone has funding for this feature...

Elastic Search (like a number of other search indexes) requires a Tomcat server. As far as I know, the installation is pretty standard, but we'll also have some pointers for making it work with Mahara.

Cheers

Kristina