[wp-hackers] alternative database support

[Robert Deaton]

Here's a summary of all the reasons why I think this is a bad idea.

1. Its a lot more work than I think a lot of people are willing to
admit. For something like ADODB, all the queries will have to be
rewritten, and the structure of the posts table will have to be
changed since the way we store dates is reliant on a MySQL specific
extension to the ANSI specifications.

2. Speed and scalability. I'll leave the fact that ADODB has overhead
out of this. Rather than that, think of how we're supposed to optimize
our database schema for different database servers. We don't have the
opportunity to create indexes that may be blazingly fast on MySQL and
do nothing on another database system, and vice versa. The speed of
the database has long been a complaining point on WP for many, and I
doubt that without the ability to fine-tune indexes to their best
performance point on each individual system, we're going to see any
gain, and more likely a loss.

3. Plugins. A large portion of the reason WP is so popular is its
plugin architecture. If a seperate ADODB version is created and
released, this now means plugin authors have to choose, as queries
will not just drop in and work. This means that popular plugins
already out for WordPress would have to be adapted, or the users of
the other version would have to go without them. Any new plugins for
the new version wouldn't work with the current one, and once again we
have a dilema with a portion of the audience being left out.

4. Controlling the environment. I personally think that with a
software that is supposed to work on the widest range of servers
possible without being a burden, we've already hit that burden. The
amount of issues we field with IIS vs Apache vs Some other httpd is
large enough, we're still fixing IIS redirect problems to go into
2.0.5. To keep WordPress as sucessful as it is, I think we need to
still control the environment that we operate in as much as possible
without sacrificing current users. This means not giving up our
preference for database servers, our choice for programming language,
etc.

5. Support. I don't think the support staff would appreciate having to
field the new questions about things they've never heard of. We'll
have the support asking us support questions on what all these
database systems are.

-- 
--Robert Deaton