Question about cowtacular infrastructure

[Alainsane]

Hi.

I work with someone who (I think) worked with you back East. He
really likes your cowtacular system, and I have a far lesser helpdesk
built once in php/mysql and twice (for primary use) in ColdFusion/
oracle, so I thought I'd take a peek at this.

I was wondering why you ended up going with sqlite instead of mysql.
I don't have experience with the former, so I'm not asking
rhetorically.

If I was unable to convince our local Web admins to install the
necessary sqlite modules, would it be impossible to make it work with
mysql? Just curious. :-)

Cheers.

[Chris VanHorn]

Hi,

Originally, I had developed Cowtacular to work with MySQL, Oracle and
SQLite. But I found that maintaining (primarily testing) support
across those different database platforms was a bit a of work that I
didn't have the time to do.

I ended up picking SQLite because:

1. It is not strongly typed like PHP and thus a better match.
2. Helpdesk databases rarely get all that large. Ours has 8+ years of
data (Over 50,000 tickets) in it and is still under 100MB in size.
3. Backups are easier. I have found in the past that many people do
not know how to properly backup a database that is hosted on something
such as MySQL, ORACLE, etc. SQLite database files can be backed up
just like any other file on your server.
4. It is easier to get up and running, especially for people who are
not too familiar with database management.
5. There are fewer moving parts so to speak. With other database
systems, you have to make sure the database service is up and running
and the database is online. SQlite makes troubleshooting easier.

On the MySQL note, it would not be terribly difficult to adjust it to
work with MySQL. 99% of all database interactions are performed
within global/lib.php file. If you were to adjust them to perform
MySQL calls instead, it should work for the most part.

I hope that helps answer your questions. I am working on a pre-
packaged version of Cowtacular in a VMWare virtual machine, but it's
not ready for the masses yet.

- Chris

[Alainsane]

Thank you for the reply. I can definitely see how management could be
easier: writing to .db files (that could be) stored in the same
general location as the app...instead of communicating across ODBC
connections to tables/databases/dataspaces/servers over which someone
else has ultimate control. Cheers!