Today several developers prioritized, closed, or followed up on eleven database bugs, and discussed how to improve support for non-MySQL databases in MediaWiki. The details are in the notes: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/Databases_20111102 with summaries in the comments on each bug.

Microsoft's Ben Lobaugh volunteered to lead an effort towards automated testing on non-MySQL databases in the Wikimedia Labs infrastructure, and additional infrastructures as necessary. He'll help us get some Windows machines, or a setup in a Microsoft-run Azure cloud, so we can test on Microsoft SQL Server properly.

How you can help MediaWiki administrators who don't use MySQL:

* Write tests or specs. Ben and DJ Bauch want to work on better unit testing per https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32118 (special page SQL queries), and could use specifications to test against. Improve https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Database_testing .

* Try to reproduce this installation failure on SQLite or PostgreSQL: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28172

* Fix "Database layer should automagically add GROUP BY columns on backends that need them (postgres)" https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26273 . This is a large project.

* Make a meta-schema so that we no longer use tables.sql as a canonical source. Chad and Max started in http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/abstract-schema/ . See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/Databases_20111102#Idea...: for more discussion. This is a large project.