Re: [Gusdev-gusdev] LoadTaxon plugin

[Jonathan C. <cra...@sn...>]

Paul-

On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, pjm wrote:
> Steve, Jonathan,
>
> Are there any plans to make DB specific code compartmentized? I know some SQL is
> bound to be DB specific for performance or specific feature. Just wondered as
> we'd love to give away GeneDB (and hence GUS) so others can have their own
> installation. I guess you would too since you already have given it away :)

Yes, we definitely want to separate the dbms-specific code from the rest
in a clean and understandable way.  However, we're definitely not there
yet.  When we made the switch from Sybase to Oracle a couple of years ago
we did a fairly good job of isolating the dbms-specific code, at least in
the Perl object layer, which is where most of it appears.  But since then
there's no question that we've been careless in allowing dbms-specific
code to creep back in, and there's also the related issue that when *new*
dbms-specific code was required, we would implement it only for Oracle,
not for both Oracle and Sybase.  Anyway, the short answer is that our
eventual plan is to be able to support at least one other DBMS in addition
to Oracle, and we're planning to do this for either MySQL or PostgreSQL,
since both are open source and freely available.

Jonathan