(Article) Drupal + Oracle: Inside the OraDrup Project

Article : Drupal + Oracle: Inside the OraDrup Project

What is Drupal?
Open-source CMSs have been around for quite some time. They come in various forms and are implemented using a wide spectrum of technology including Java, PERL, Python, and the ubiquitous PHP. Some CMSs focus solely on one particular type of content such as the written word with maybe a smattering of image handling. Others can boast a feature list as long as your arm that includes audio, video, arbitrary documents, structured information, and events.

Drupal is an example of an advanced content management framework. With Drupal, it is possible to manage a variety of content and to do so in a consistent and well-organized manner. A Drupal site is multi-user oriented and can function as a blog, discussion forum, a collaborative authoring tool, directory, general community site, or any combination of them. It can be a very powerful tool for building complex Web sites or for incorporating a HTTP-based interface to an existing system.

Drupal started out in the year 2000 as a simple, nameless internal news site with a built-in bulletin board allowing a group of student friends to leave each other messages. It was not long after that when the site established itself on the World Wide Web. It received the name it has today and was released as open source software. It captured the interest of many people and soon began to take on a life of its own, incorporating ideas such as collaboration, content management, work-flow, syndication, distributed authentication, and more. Today, there are four hundred or so people world-wide working on various aspects of the system and this number continues to grow.

Why Bring Oracle and Drupal Together?
So where does Oracle fit in? To date, Drupal has principally been a MySQL-oriented system. A very popular deployment choice for Drupal installations is the LAMP stack (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP). Of course, Drupal is equally at home running under any platform capable of hosting MySQL and PHP.

This is all well and good for the average implementation but sometimes the "M" in LAMP is not an option. Some organizations may not have the luxury of being able to incorporate another database server into their operations. In other cases, MySQL simply might not be the right solution for the task. In such circumstances, the adoption of Drupal is unlikely.

Furthermore, with Drupal having such an active developer community, it is difficult to see why it should not expand its horizons to include Oracle technology. In doing so, Drupal will become a viable option for Oracle-based developers and vice-versa. Were that to happen, it would be very exciting to see it taking advantage of or benefitting from such Oracle features as:

Data partitioning and parallelism
Replication and queuing technology
Real Application Clusters
Transparent Application Failover and other high availability features
Fine Grained Access Control at the database level
Automatic segment space management

Furthermore, with Oracle Database having such a huge presence, it would offer the opportunity for Drupal to gain greater exposure where, previously, it would have been overlooked.