postgres support

[huobazi]

ref: http://discuss.flarum.org/d/597-does-flarum-support-postgres

[dz0ny]

:+1:

[jirutka]

+1

[korya]

It would be great to see postgres officially supported.

[vjousse]

Just FYI, I'm having a look at the psql support. If you have any news on your side, don't hesitate to let me know.

[fdutheil]

I'd like to add a +1, but I'm not sure of the status of this feature request: is it already upstream and needs testing or is it cancelled after the WIP has stalled?

[vladipus]

I too would like to know if the pg support is there.

[vjousse]

I did some significant work here: https://github.com/flarum/core/pull/856 but was not able to finish it alone. I suppose it's not a priority right now, but as far as I remember the modifications I made allowed the forum to be installed using postgres.

[phonicmouse]

Guys can you clarify something? I know from here that you use Laravel's drivers, which support PostgreSQL. So if i try to install flarum simply using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL it just works or not?

[franzliedke]

@phonicmouse As mentioned in that forum thread, the driver needs to be made available in the installer. Once that is done, any problems that arise have to be fixed. Somebody needs to experiment with it and see how much fails. Do you want to give it a shot? :grinning:

[luceos]

From the top of my head, there are some incompatibility issues with either some (Gambit) queries and/or migrations. Either of these are specifically written against a MySQL database and need to be modified.

[phonicmouse]

@franzliedke I'll definitely do it. As soon as i have some spare time I'll work on it 😋 @luceos Well, after we locate them, we just have to make them cross-database, which shouldn't be too hard, but just a bit long, but i've never looked at the code, so...😭

[mkarnicki]

@phonicmouse

we just have to make them cross-database, which shouldn't be too hard

Note there was already an attempt to support Postgres (see above in the thread) and it didn't turn out so simple. Mostly because the integration has to be correct in all aspects from the Flarum perspective, so: easy for the users to choose/setup. In any case, I wish you the very best if you take this on :)! Quite a few folks are looking forward to Postgres support. Few of us have time to work on it though.

[phonicmouse]

@mkarnicki I will definitely have a look at that. And yeah, I think the main issue is just finding the time to work on this. As soon as I have some spare time I'll try to solve this.

[fr0der1c]

It has been for 4 years...

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. We do this to keep the amount of open issues to a manageable minimum. In any case, thanks for taking an interest in this software and contributing by opening the issue in the first place!

[mkarnicki]

I still think this would be a valuable addition, esp. that Laravel makes it so easy to interchange database types one would use, so I'm leaving this comment here hoping the report is not killed by the stale bot and that it maybe receives some attention in the future. Cheers.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. We do this to keep the amount of open issues to a manageable minimum. In any case, thanks for taking an interest in this software and contributing by opening the issue in the first place!

[franzliedke]

After some discussion in the core team (a while ago)...

We changed our opinion and currently do not plan to tackle this as part of our roadmap. We will, of course, be open for / discuss community contributions for this feature - it was brought up from the community in the first place anyway.

So I am closing this issue to avoid appearing like we plan to work on this feature.

[luceos]

Even though this saddens me deeply. I think the motto "do one thing and do it well" is key here. Let's focus on getting Flarum working exceptionally well with MySQL.

[c33s]

i ask myself why so many people use database abstraction layers like doctrine or many parts from symfony and still develop mysql only code.

[tankerkiller125]

@c33s Often because those libraries and abstractions make working with databases much easier, but often very advanced things (for example search) requires using raw SQL which often is database specific. And since ALL host offer MySQL (including shared host) MySQL tends to win the argument for web apps looking for the largest use. Other databases are great for specific kinds of things (for example Gitlab has to use Postgres because of the database features it needs) but for something like Flarum it makes the most sense to focus on MySQL.

[luceos]

I'd like to point out that we are not entirely excluding alternative Eloquent-compatible database drivers for future versions. But we do for now to prevent any delays on releasing stable.

[blackandred]

I personally don't see any sense in using MySQL in web applications, recently I moved from MySQL to PostgreSQL in a web application - the cost of maintaining PostgreSQL is much lower in my opinion.

It would be nice to see Flarum on PostgreSQL so I should not maintain MySQL instance. Apps in other languages uses more PostgreSQL than MySQL, so it is natural that a PostgreSQL instance in most cases could be shared between applications.

[askvortsov1]

I personally don't see any sense in using MySQL in web applications, recently I moved from MySQL to PostgreSQL in a web application - the cost of maintaining PostgreSQL is much lower in my opinion.

It would be nice to see Flarum on PostgreSQL so I should not maintain MySQL instance. Apps in other languages uses more PostgreSQL than MySQL, so it is natural that a PostgreSQL instance in most cases could be shared between applications.

I agree with all of this. There are many advantages of PostgreSQL. One of the ones I came across recently is the ability to put structural changes in transactions: that could have been quite helpful in flarum/framework#2258.

Even if it's far in the future, I think this issue is worth considering. I've already kept it in mind when approaching some other issues (#2258, flarum/framework#3350, etc).

[mkarnicki]

Basically, there are 18 subscribers getting notified of every comment on this issue, so the best way to show your support for issues on GitHub is to upvote the original issue at the top by @huobazi . Thanks, have a good day.

[Bishwas-py]

Is it supporting PostgreSQL now?

[red0888]

+1 for postgresql support! It's faster than mysql

[Danter3]

If Flarum wants to be at the forefront this should be taken seriously, the performance of the new PostgreSQL 15 version (the faster sorting is insane and I guess it will do wonders with large Flarum databases) will accelerate its adoption even more. It is the database engine that has had the fastest and constant growth for years (https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend).

I want to be constructive, it is true that as I have reviewed I see that Flarum is actively striving to improve its code to improve scalability in large communities, but what sense does this make if we keep it on database engines like MySQL and MariaDB that are in decline for years, in fact the younger programmers do not even know of its existence with all the nodejs things and serverless programming only know PostgreSQL, which I think also for these young people would make Flarum more attractive and more comfortable for the changing trend of new stacks.

I think it would be a great decision to raise this for 2.0, honestly it would be a mistake to leave it out, being a breakthrough change, this would mean leaving it for 3.0 at the earliest and what year would we go to? 2026 at the earliest? I don't mean to sound bad, I mean realistically if it's late now in 2026 it would be extremely late and I don't think 3.0 would come out before then.

I just wanted to give my point of view and I hope I've been constructive, I just don't want to see Flarum lag behind other software now that it's stable and breakthrough releases are slow to arrive and can play bad tricks.

[Danter3]

Hi people, I don't know if you have heard, but the Flarum team has revealed that the 2.0 to be released later this year, will incorporate PostgreSQL support along with a bunch of other cool stuff, here you can have a look at it (https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2023-balancing-open-source-and-success).

Exciting times are ahead for Flarum 👌

[k4r4b3y]

Flarum team has revealed that the 2.0 to be released later this year, will incorporate PostgreSQL support

Looking forward to this. Finally I won't have to install mariadb alongside postgresql on the same server.

[TASA-Ed]

I'll use PostgreSQL whenever it's supported!

[DavideIadeluca]

For anyone still wondering, PostgreSQL support was added by @SychO9 in https://github.com/flarum/framework/pull/3985 for 2.x 🚀. So this issue may be closed