Presenting some case studies on DBAL for TYPO3 version 4.

1. It Works!
Presenting DBAL use in real life.

2. Overview
Introduction
Case Studies
Oracle 10g
MS SQL Server
MySQL
Summary
Q&A

3. Introduction

4. About me
Karsten Dambekalns
k.dambekalns@fishfarm.de
Co-Founder of fishfarm netsolutions
Active Member of the TYPO3 Association
Core Team Member and participating of the current 5.0
development

5. Introduction
DBAL project started in 2004
Slow – but steady – progress since then
First official release with TYPO3 version 4.0 in 2006
Still some issues, still lack of feedback
Some real-life projects getting done
fields include NGOs, banking, marketing, manufacturing,
services

6. Current status
Works pretty well
Satisfactory speed
Issues with BLOB fields may come up
Non-DBAL-compliant extensions break (naturally)
20 open issues in the bug tracker, some may be fixed already
Further enhancements planned, specifically performance-wise

7. Oracle 10g

8. CuCoMa on Oracle
Helps with planning, conducting and monitoring centralized and
decentralized marketing activities like mailings and call centers
Based on TYPO3 to make use of it‘s features for defining and
handling content related to those activities
Originally based on MySQL
Oracle was and still is a customer requirement
no in-house MySQL knowledge
scalability needs

9. Having fun with Oracle
Known Oracle problem: field name length restrictions
Can be solved with field name mapping
It turned out Oracle 10g changed in ways that broke DBAL:
A „recycle bin“ was introduced, that caused ghost tables to
appear: BIN$/EUEmP2XQr+vN09otWMexg==$0
TYPO3 changed, too:
In 4.0 more than one group can have access to an element. Do
you think NULL is an empty string?

10. Facts & Figures
Two servers with each 2 x 3,4 GHz Intel P4, Raid, 4GB RAM,
Windows 2003 Server Apache 2.0
Software: ZendCore for Oracle, Oracle 10g R2
Currently ~500 logged in users
DB: ~10MB for TYPO3, ~180MB for CuCoMa showing strong
growth

11. Does it work well?
There is currently one bug left in that project, causing BE user
rights to fail in certain cases - otherwise it works fine!
Speed is perceived as only slightly slower than direct access to
MySQL provides
For the future performance advantages are expected as the
amount of data in the system grows

12. MS SQL Server

13. [wmdb]:
A Knowledge Base on SQL Server
TYPO3-based knowledge base application for a german
automobile manufacturer (no, not VW...)
Based on TYPO3 because it allowed fast and easy development
and provides the needed flexibility and features
Based on MS SQL Server because the customer
has no in-house knowledge for MySQL
thinks there is no support for open source software

14. Facts & Figures
Software
Windows 2003 Server SP1 in VMware GSX running on a
Windows 2003 host machine
Apache 1.3.37, PHP 4.1
SQL Server 2000 SP3
Hardware
Dual AMD Opteron 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM

15. It works!
Problems including datatype conversion and identifier quoting
were solved
SQL Server needed some configuration tweaks
Performance was a problem on the production system - as
opposed to the development environment
moving the VMware setup to a machine not being at 100%
CPU load solved this
All in all it works as it should!

16. MySQL Cluster

17. Greenpeace Germany
Greenpeace Germany is using TYPO3 after having switched from
a system based on OpenACS in 2005
@artplan[21] from Berlin is the lead for the whole website
project and the general contractor for Greenpeace
net&works from Hannover is responsible for planning the
hardware infrastructure
Data migration from Oracle (OpenACS) to MySQL (TYPO3) done
by fishfarm netsolutions from Braunschweig

18. A problem to solve...
The web servers cache temporary files locally
Shared files are stored on distributed storage space
Shared database content is held in the MySQL cluster
Wouldn‘t it be great to have the temporary database content on
the individual web servers, too?

19. DBAL to the rescue
First we had to backport DBAL to TYPO3 version 3.8.1 and make
sure the used extensions where DBAL-compliant
This affected versioning, t3lib_sql* and DBAL itself
A handful of extensions needed to be tweaked, too
Special problem: FE rendering joins pages and cache_pages
see patch in DBAL doc folder
All changes have been merged into the core, where useful

20. Facts & Figures
The planned setup consists of:
3 database servers running Continuent uni/cluster for MySQL
4 web servers with Apache and PHP 4
Shared files are stored on NFS
Load balancer
The setup is scheduled to go live the week after the T3CON

21. Summary

22. What have we learned?
The DBAL is working „well enough“ to use it
Some issues remain, additional work is needed to get it up and
running
Some problems can probably never be solved
We need you to tell us about your problems and fixes!
We need a new way of accessing data for the future!

23. Questions? Answers!
Maybe...

24. It Works! People to Share
Inspiring
Presenting DBAL use in real life.
Karsten Dambekalns
karsten@typo3.org | k.dambekalns@fishfarm.de