FAQ - Does openIMIS support other database management systems than PostgreSQL?

With the migration done by BlueSquare the foundation was created to do this kind of DB switch with relative ease. The reason behind this is that SQL is a standard language for querying databases. SQL is supported by all major database management systems, although there are slight differences in how they implemented this standard - the dialects. So in reality we never migrated away from SQL, we just migrated the legacy version of openIMIS from a very specific Microsoft SQL dialect to a more standard way of using SQL, which can in theory work on different DBMS products. Because of the programming library that BlueSquare used to implement the database access form openIMIS, it is relatively easy to just install a specific DB driver and then have openIMIS use the new dialect.

However, there are still differences in what the different DBMS can do. Depending on the driver, it might allow for 90% of compatibility with not all functionalities covered. Even these 90% will only make sure that data is read - when it comes to performance optimisation on high data volumes there is always a certain amount of DBMS specific configuration needed. For this reason the openIMIS Initiative can only support one reference DB system, which is PostgreSQL. We also try to maintain backward combability with MS SQL Server, but there will be most likely be gaps coming up in future versions. For everything else we cannot provide that support as we would have to test a variety of different DBMS with every new version of openIMIS.