[Mediawiki-l] Using tables with different prefixes in the same wiki

[Lisa Ridley]

Hey guys,

It's been a while since I've done anything with MediaWiki,and I've been looking on mediawiki.org and didn't find the answer to this question so far.

I've got a 3rd party package written in PHP that uses MySQL as a database back-end, and while I like what the package does, it is poorly written from a programming standpoint (lots of security vulnerabilities).  It also does not have the capabilities of community editing, which is going to be an important feature for a website I'm architecting.

I'd like to incorporate this package via a large MediaWiki extension into MediaWiki, using the basic table layouts from the existing package.  The main issue I see so far is table name conflicts, which are easily solvable with different table prefixes.

However, I'm looking for a way to use the MediaWiki abstraction layer to access the tables from this third party package, and I need to be able to interact with the tables, including all CRUD functions.

Is there a way to access tables with different prefixes using the MediaWiki db abstraction layer from within the same MediaWiki site?  I swear I thought there was, but if it exists I haven't found the documentation on it so far.

Or, if you have pointers on how best to make this happen without resorting to native mysql query or using the PHP PDO, I'm open to suggestions here.  I'd really like to use the MediaWiki db abstraction layer if possible.

Thanks!

Lisa Ridley