database backend for GNATS

[Mel Hatzis]

I've been working on extending GNATS to support various backend
datastores. It is my hope that this work can be rolled into
(or perhaps become the basis for) GNATS 4.1 or whatever the next
release may be (GNATS 5.0?).

To date, I have successfully completed the implementation
of a version of GNATS which can be configured to run with
an Oracle backend. I have managed to roll this out at the
company where I work where it has met with much success.

If you are interested in evaluating this work, you can download
it (and review the related documentation) from:

    http://professional.juniper.net/gnats/

The approach I've taken is to separate out all the functionality
associated with access to the GNATS PR data repository into
a separate library....essentially creating a clean interface
between GNATS and it's data store. The front-end utilities
and applications such as Gnatsweb are unaffected...they
continue to work exactly the same.

Currently, there are two back ends: the standard flat-file
repository, and an Oracle-based backend. We have been using
the Oracle version at Juniper for six months, with tens of
thousands of PRs and hundreds of users.

The work is based on a snapshot of the 4.0 beta 2 source, though
all subsequent patches have been incorporated...so all the work
that went into GNATS 4.0 is included. As of today, all patches to
the CVS version of GNATS have been included in this project.

It is my hope that this work will be extended to support
additional SQL datastores such as MySQL and PostgreSQL.
I believe that this could now be accomplished without
expending a great deal of effort. I'm willing to provide
a template to anyone interested in pursuing this endevour
to get this work underway.

--
Mel Hatzis