I know there is some chatter on the forums about a MySql provider, but I didn't see anything current.  IMHO, it is crippling to DNN to rely exclusively on MS SQL.  I realize the DNN team has a close relationship with MS, but it's very much against the open source and community spirit of the project.  The bottom line is the in almost all but the highest volume (and lowest performing) hosting situations, it costs substantially more to run MS SQL.  I offer hosting services (as a reseller) and tend to steer clients away from DNN and towards other options like Drupal primarily for this reason.

Does anyone else have insights as to whether or not alternate data providers are in the development road map?  Or why this has not been done before?  The DNN platform is already in version 4.x and has been around for a long time with promises of a data abstraction layer, but never realized.  I know there were some 3rd party providers, but these were not maintained, nor can be they be counted on.  It really needs to be part of the core.

There is quite some work invovled in creating/maintaining a data provider albeit even the MS SQL one. I have authored and maintained the Oracle dataprovider from the 2.x days of DNN, ie the promise of the data abstraction layer is correct and has been present since the 2x days.
Take a look at the tables/stored procedures in the MS SQL server version and see how the conversion would look like.

Sanjay

 

Sanjay

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