Sybase/Snowflake database for process engine

[kaushpra]

Hi everyone,

1. Are there any plans to support Snowflake, Teradata or Sybase database?
2. If a developer plans to contribute towards on a new database support, what could be the good start points?
3. Even the alternative Pega has started some support on Sybase. Moreover, a user has asked for Sybase database support in 2019. Why are we not involving it in the list of supported databases? This may be helpful for EE users.

Thanks.

[Niall]

Hi @kaushpra

Welcome to the forum, and thanks for the question.

@kaushpra

Are there any plans to support Snowflake, Teradata or Sybase database?

There are no plans for supporting these at the moment.

@kaushpra

If a developer plans to contribute towards on a new database support, what could be the good start points?

If you’re interested you can start here: https://camunda.com/developers/how-to-contribute/ and if you have any questions about specifics of contributing you can post here on the forum

@kaushpra

Even the alternative Pega has started some support on Sybase. Moreover, a user has asked for Sybase database support in 2019. Why are we not involving it in the list of supported databases? This may be helpful for EE users.

We do play close attention to supported environments that the community is interested in using and while very occasionally we hear people interested in using Sybase there really isn’t really much interesting from the overall communty or our customers at the moment. This could always change of course.

[thorben]

Hi,

It’s great that you are interested in running Camunda on a new database technology and considering a contribution. I want to expand a bit on Niall’s repsonse: Adding support for a new database technology to the product is a pretty costly operation for us. In terms of code it may be not too complex, however the lesser visible efforts are:

• We need to constantly cover this technology in our CI to avoid regressions
• We need to be confident in supporting our enterprise users with this technology
• When building new features in the future, we are more restricted in the SQL statements that we can write (as we are mostly tied to the minimal intersection of features that all our supported databases provide)

In that sense, officially supporting a new database technology is not something that we do lightly and we may reject a community contribution to the core codebase. This depends a lot on the overall demand for the technology and Camunda.

That said, this is not necessarily the end of the story:

• @langfr maintains his own fork of Camunda with Informix support: GitHub - langfr/camunda-bpm-platform: Flexible framework for workflow and process automation (see master branch). You consider do something similar. It’s also a great example to see what parts of the codebase you may have to touch.
• Instead of a fork, you could also try to build this as a community extension. If the process engine misses extension points to achieve this (which I somewhat expect), then we could talk about contributing these extension points so that it becomes easier to plug in your own database support

Cheers,
Thorben

[kaushpra]

Hi @thorben,

The forked Camunda repository with Informix support definitely helps

This is probably the guidance which I was looking for, will add to this thread in case of any updates.

Thank you for giving me this information, this is very supportive of you.

Best regards!.

[kaushpra]

Hi @thorben ,

Happy Friday!

I have been able to run and thoroughly test the Camunda engine on Sybase ASE database. It would be my pleasure to contribute the Sybase related changes in the 7.17.0 release if there is any scope to onboard this database.

As I understand the efforts required to maintain/support a new database in Camunda, I leave it upto you to take a call on this

Many thanks!

[thorben]

Hi @kaushpra,

That’s great to hear. We will not add Sybase support with 7.17 for the reasons mentioned above, but I would like to see your code so feel free to share it on github. We could then have a look if it makes sense to contribute some parts independent of official Sybase support or if we can create a process engine plugin out of it that could live as a proper community extension. Also it could be useful for other people who are interested in using Camunda with Sybase. What do you think?

Cheers,
Thorben

[siyaa21]

Hi @kaushpra ,

We are planning to have Camunda embedded sprinboot with sysbase. It would be helpful if you share your code on github or help me how you established sybase connection with springboot application.

[kaushpra]

Hi @siyaa21 ,

Which version of Camunda with Sybase support are you looking for? I am currently able to run Camunda 7.15.0, 7.16.0 and 7.17.0 on Sybase ASE 16.4. Please note that Sybase is currently not officially supported by Camunda.

Thanks!