I want to install moodle on my server but i have alot of courses that i need to use a strong database so i want to install the moodle with oracle datebase
what are the steps ?
is it need a coding part or not ?
If you want a strong database on which to run Moodle, then use Postgres.
Oracle may be many things (expensive to buy and expensive to administer spring to mind
) but it is not a good database to run Moodle on for two reasons:
1. Oracle does not follow the SQL standard very closely, so Moodle has to jump through hoops to make it work at all. (The worst, to my mind, is that it cannot distinguish an empty string from NULL). Jumping through those hoops hurts performance.
2. Oracle's connection protocol (used for transferring data from the database server to the web server) is hopeless for database driven web sites. Martin Langhoff investigated this because he could not believe how bad the performance was, and it turns out it needs a separate connection/package/something for each CLOB or BLOB, and content management applications like Moodle use a lot of those.
The Open University (3 of the 10 biggest Moodle's in the world http://moodle.org/stats/) is currently running happily on Postgres. There is an attempt being made to move all the OU's systems to Oracle, but our initial load testing is showing that using Oracle is at least 10 times slower on equivalent hardware.
Moodle.org, and I would guess a lot of the other big sites, run on MySQL.
Oracle may be many things (expensive to buy and expensive to administer spring to mind
1. Oracle does not follow the SQL standard very closely, so Moodle has to jump through hoops to make it work at all. (The worst, to my mind, is that it cannot distinguish an empty string from NULL). Jumping through those hoops hurts performance.
2. Oracle's connection protocol (used for transferring data from the database server to the web server) is hopeless for database driven web sites. Martin Langhoff investigated this because he could not believe how bad the performance was, and it turns out it needs a separate connection/package/something for each CLOB or BLOB, and content management applications like Moodle use a lot of those.
The Open University (3 of the 10 biggest Moodle's in the world http://moodle.org/stats/) is currently running happily on Postgres. There is an attempt being made to move all the OU's systems to Oracle, but our initial load testing is showing that using Oracle is at least 10 times slower on equivalent hardware.
Moodle.org, and I would guess a lot of the other big sites, run on MySQL.
thanks alot for your replay
sure i am now flowing your advice and downloading the PostgreSQL
but i need to ask you is there any spicial steps to work on PostgreSQL
what i mean is what i sould to to make moodle see the PostgreSQL .
Just like any database, you need to create a user name, password and database for Moodle to use, and then type that information into the Moodle installer. The Postgres online does are pretty good.
Also, as with any high-performance system, you need to learn how to measure and tune it. That will apply to both Postgres, but also Apache and PHP. I am sure you can find information by looking through the hardware and performance forum, or at the relevant bits of the administrator documentation on http://docs.moodle.org/.
If you are really serious about this, and have the money, I would suggest paying Catalyst IT (one of the Moodle Partner companies (http://moodle.com/partners/list/) for some consulting. There are both Postgres and Moodle experts.
Also, as with any high-performance system, you need to learn how to measure and tune it. That will apply to both Postgres, but also Apache and PHP. I am sure you can find information by looking through the hardware and performance forum, or at the relevant bits of the administrator documentation on http://docs.moodle.org/.
If you are really serious about this, and have the money, I would suggest paying Catalyst IT (one of the Moodle Partner companies (http://moodle.com/partners/list/) for some consulting. There are both Postgres and Moodle experts.
Thanks Tim. Interesting stuff!
What about MSSQL? Is it "as bad" as Oracle?
I would say not.
If you are a big software company, and you have a near monopoly on part of a market, what you want to do is to make your product as idiosyncratic as possible, and bundle at much functionality into it as possible, in an attempt to lock your exiting customers in, and leverage your monopoly to take over other parts of the market.
If, on the other hand, you are not in a monopoly position, you want standards and interoperability so customers can easily switch.
So, while in the desktop operating system, Microsoft played dirty to keep and abuse its monopoly position (e.g bundling IE with the OS to kill Netscape), in the enterprise database area it was a latecomer to a market dominated by Oracle and IBM DB2, so it had to go the follow standards and reduce vendor lock-in route. It did this as big companies often do when they are lacking a key technology. It bought out a tiny DB company with some good core technology, then through its development resource at it. (I can't remember the details of which company it bought when.) Anyway, the net result is that MSSQL sticks pretty close to the standard in most respects. I think it is just the normal areas like string concatenation and how to select just the first 50 records where it does its own thing, but fortunately the Moodle DB libraries have those parts of SQL nicely abstracted.
Note how my theory ties in with Oracle being one of the incumbents, and not following the standards very closely.
It is also interesting to compare how big commercial software companies behave with how Moodle behaves as a fairly dominant player in the LMS space. No one is trying to extend Moodle to become a full ePortfolio or SIS system. Instead, we are working to make Moodle interoperate smoothly with any other ePortfolio system, and integrate with SISs.
If you are a big software company, and you have a near monopoly on part of a market, what you want to do is to make your product as idiosyncratic as possible, and bundle at much functionality into it as possible, in an attempt to lock your exiting customers in, and leverage your monopoly to take over other parts of the market.
If, on the other hand, you are not in a monopoly position, you want standards and interoperability so customers can easily switch.
So, while in the desktop operating system, Microsoft played dirty to keep and abuse its monopoly position (e.g bundling IE with the OS to kill Netscape), in the enterprise database area it was a latecomer to a market dominated by Oracle and IBM DB2, so it had to go the follow standards and reduce vendor lock-in route. It did this as big companies often do when they are lacking a key technology. It bought out a tiny DB company with some good core technology, then through its development resource at it. (I can't remember the details of which company it bought when.) Anyway, the net result is that MSSQL sticks pretty close to the standard in most respects. I think it is just the normal areas like string concatenation and how to select just the first 50 records where it does its own thing, but fortunately the Moodle DB libraries have those parts of SQL nicely abstracted.
Note how my theory ties in with Oracle being one of the incumbents, and not following the standards very closely.
It is also interesting to compare how big commercial software companies behave with how Moodle behaves as a fairly dominant player in the LMS space. No one is trying to extend Moodle to become a full ePortfolio or SIS system. Instead, we are working to make Moodle interoperate smoothly with any other ePortfolio system, and integrate with SISs.
realy realy Moodle is a very big and important project.
we are not very big company we are mansoura university
so we realy have avery big users database
and we have alot of courses also
the behave of the moodle become so bad and slowly with this big database because we use mysql
so i think that if i use oracle or Postgres
i am now going to try Postgres
i hope it work fine but i am have abig question is it easy
it it about changing the connection only .
and they are here want to do the exams online can moodle handle this.
laso i have a question can i encrypt the question while they are in the database so no atacker can take these questions because the questions will be the finail exam
yes u can install moodle with oracle database and this requires coding.
try this
What you will need in order to get started:
Install php and apache using the yum command from within a superuser account:
Install php addons (pear, gd, ldap using the yum command from within a superuser account):
Start Apache using the redhat start script:
Help Document for starting Apache in Red Hat.
Navigate to your web accessible directory:
Get The Latest version of Moodle using wget:
Unzip Moodle:
Make Directory Writable to allow the install script to create the config.php:
Create a directory for Moodle Data and then set permissions for it, making sure that this directort is not web accessible:
Get and Unzip the Oracle Instant Client which can be found here (I have loaded them onto my own ftp server for easier access) into the /var/instantclient/
Go into the Instant Client Directory that was created by unzipping and make a couple of symbolic links:
Use Pear to install oci8 support for PHP (the connection from PHP to Oracle)
In setting up the Oracle and Php Communication, open up the php.ini file in /etc and make the following modifications:
Restart your Apache:
Go to the Moodle Installation directory via a browser
Enter in the following information for moodle directories:
In the database connect screen format the database information into the following format:
Keep on clicking next and okay and you should be able to get all the way through to this:
Set the Cron Process by navigating to the /etc directory and putting the command in the crontab (here is a crontab tutorial):
try this
What you will need in order to get started:
- An Oracle Database with a UTF-8 character set and the following format for a tnsnames.ora (which is a result of creating the Database, so this may not be useful until later)
-
MOODLE =(DESCRIPTION =(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = Your-Oracle-Server)(PORT = 1521))(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = Secondary-Oracle-Server)(PORT = 1521))(LOAD_BALANCE = yes)(CONNECT_DATA =(SERVER = DEDICATED)(SERVICE_NAME = MOOD)))
- This is what we used:
-
2xQuad Core Processor2GB RAM20GB of disk storageOS - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5)
-
- ssh -l <yourusername> <your linux server address>
Install php and apache using the yum command from within a superuser account:
- sudo yum install httpd php
Install php addons (pear, gd, ldap using the yum command from within a superuser account):
- sudo yum install php-pear php-gd php-ldap php-devel php-xmlrpc php-mbstring (and php-mssql if you have an updated repository like utteramblings)
Start Apache using the redhat start script:
- sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start
Help Document for starting Apache in Red Hat.
Navigate to your web accessible directory:
- cd /var/www/html
Get The Latest version of Moodle using wget:
- sudo wget http://download.moodle.org/stable19/moodle-weekly-19.zip (or whatever the version number is now)
Unzip Moodle:
- sudo unzip moodle-weekly-19.zip
Make Directory Writable to allow the install script to create the config.php:
- sudo chmod -R 0777 moodle
Create a directory for Moodle Data and then set permissions for it, making sure that this directort is not web accessible:
- cd /var/www
- sudo mkdir moodledata
- sudo chmod -R 0770 moodledata
- sudo chown -R apache moodledata
- sudo chgrp -R nobody moodledata
Get and Unzip the Oracle Instant Client which can be found here (I have loaded them onto my own ftp server for easier access) into the /var/instantclient/
- cd /var
- sudo mkdir instantclient
- cd /var/instantclient
- sudo wget http://learningischange.com/sdk-11.1.0.7.0-linux-x86_64.zip
- sudo wget http://learningischange.com/basic-11.1.0.70-linux-x86_64.zip
- sudo unzip sdk-11.1.0.7.0-linux-x86_64.zip
- sudo unzip basic-11.1.0.70-linux-x86_64.zip
Go into the Instant Client Directory that was created by unzipping and make a couple of symbolic links:
- cd /var/instantclient/instantclient_11_1
- sudo ln -s libclntsh.so.11.1 libclntsh.so (The number will change with version number)
- sudo ln -s libocci.so libocci.so
Use Pear to install oci8 support for PHP (the connection from PHP to Oracle)
- sudo peardev install pecl/oci8
- When it asks you for the directory to the instantclient, put it in this format:
- instantclient,/var/instantclient/instantclient_11_1(Or whatever version number the folder is)
- instantclient,/var/instantclient/instantclient_11_1(Or whatever version number the folder is)
- When it asks you for the directory to the instantclient, put it in this format:
In setting up the Oracle and Php Communication, open up the php.ini file in /etc and make the following modifications:
- cd /etc
- sudo vi php.ini
Important Note: Don't forget to enable this variable in your php.ini (or .htaccess) file:
(else, all your data will be escaped following MySQL rules, that are incorrect for Oracle)
magic_quotes_sybase = On andIn the Dynamic extensions section (just after the commented-out example entries) add: extension=oci8.so
Restart your Apache:
- sudo /etc/init.d/httpd stop
- sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start
Go to the Moodle Installation directory via a browser
Enter in the following information for moodle directories:
In the database connect screen format the database information into the following format:
Keep on clicking next and okay and you should be able to get all the way through to this:
Set the Cron Process by navigating to the /etc directory and putting the command in the crontab (here is a crontab tutorial):
- cd /etc
- sudo crontab -e