[ckan-dev] CKAN on top of Existing DBs

Thu Jul 17 10:04:10 UTC 2014

On 17 Jul 2014, at 11:42, Alfredo Serafini <seralf at gmail.com> wrote:

> For example I'm currently working for a client which uses only SQLServer, and I cannot avoid that. If i'd have support for this database, I could suggest them to install python on windows and start using CKAN as platform.

There have been some attempts at this — http://ckan.org/2012/03/30/ckan-on-windows/ was the most recent case-study I found, last time I looked/asked this list.

> Generally speaking the database is often the real lock-in, because there are many cases where it's simply impossible to migrate data, or even link data on other platform (using ODBC, for example). Providing an abstraction layer could be a real big improvement, for my point of view too.

I’ve seen (on-site, with clients) some set-ups where SAP will spit out data via the SAP API, to enable data to make it from SAP -> CKAN. I’m fairly sure some Oracles will also support this route. Not so sure about SQL Server.

One thing that would probably be needed is dumping the content — particularly if the database is within a corpnet, and needs access permissions (unless, of course, that portal’s going to live internally).