Who uses Oracle with DSpace? Anyone interested in helping retain/maintain Oracle support?

[Tim Donohue]

All,

I wanted to let the entire DSpace Community be aware of developer discussions regarding our ability to continue supporting Oracle database backends in DSpace.

Below, you'll find an email I sent to our DSpace Developer mailing list (dspace...@googlegroups.com) in mid-November requesting volunteers to help us with Oracle support activities. After 3 weeks, I've yet to find any developer volunteers and none of our current core developers or committers have Oracle expertise or use Oracle at their institutions.

If your institution currently uses DSpace with an Oracle database backend and is interested in helping ensure DSpace can continue to support Oracle, please get in touch. Without Oracle volunteers, we may need to drop support for Oracle databases and recommend all existing Oracle-based sites migrate to PostgreSQL (by using a third-party migration tool like Ora2Pg or similar).  

(Additionally, if any of you have successfully migrated a DSpace site from Oracle to PostgreSQL, I'd be interested to hear of any tips you may have. It may help us start to document Oracle to PostgreSQL migration tips for others who wish to do the same.)

Obviously, we'll send out a formal announcement if any Oracle support changes are made.

Thanks,

Tim

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From: Tim Donohue <tim.d...@lyrasis.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2021 5:25 PM
To: DSpace Developers <dspace...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Who uses Oracle with DSpace? Anyone interested in helping retain/maintain Oracle support?

 

All,

I'm curious who on this developer list may use an Oracle database for their Production installation of DSpace.

I've been noticing that it has become more difficult to locate any DSpace developers with decent Oracle experience to help us debug or fix Oracle-related issues (e.g. https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/8008 and https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/7958 and testing PR https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/pull/8028).

So, if you are using Oracle in Production, and would be interested in helping review, debug or test Orace related fixes/issues, please get in touch.

If we are unable to find Oracle developer help soon, I feel we must consider recommending (to DSpace Steering) that we stop support for Oracle databases (effective immediately).  It's increasingly obvious that most DSpace sites do not use Oracle.  It's also obvious that we've not been successful in testing/stabilizing DSpace upgrades or new features on Oracle backends.  Plus, as we all know, Oracle databases have never aligned with our open-source licensing (in that it requires a paid license to use in Production).  So, it may be time to admit that Oracle support may no longer be necessary or reasonable for DSpace.

Thoughts welcome! Please do get in touch if continued Oracle support is of interest to you.

Tim

--

Tim Donohue

Technical Lead, DSpace

tim.d...@lyrasis.org

Lyrasis.org | DSpace.org

[hb wooley]

Just letting you know, we use Oracle as our database. I have asked our Oracle/Functional Area Expert to contact Oracle for support. I sure hope support can continue, I would NOT want to find away to migrate our Oracle instance to PostgreSQL.

B. Wooley

[Tim Donohue]

All,

Per this thread from December 2021...

As of today, the DSpace Steering group has voted to deprecate Oracle support in the upcoming DSpace 7.3 release. Oracle Support will be removed from DSpace one year later (in mid-2023).

More details can be found in this new Oracle deprecation ticket: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/8214

If anyone has any questions,  let us know, or add your questions to that ticket.

Thanks,

Tim Donohue

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From: Tim Donohue <tim.d...@lyrasis.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 9, 2021 2:59 PM
To: DSpace Community <dspace-c...@googlegroups.com>; DSpace Technical Support <dspac...@googlegroups.com>