Change storage format of existing data

[John Ralls]

> On Jan 29, 2017, at 6:32 AM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Rich,
> 
> The information about the SQL back ends is somewhat hidden, mostly because the SQL back end is still considered in development and provides little immediate benefit to users. 
> 
> There are references to it on the wiki (https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Dependencies <https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Dependencies>, https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Building#Ubuntu_14.04_LTS_.28Trusty_Tahr.29 <https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Building#Ubuntu_14.04_LTS_.28Trusty_Tahr.29>), which appear to be the most documentation out there. I feel like there have been users over the years who have asked for (and received) guidance on this, but cannot locate the threads on the list at this time.
> 
> As others have mentioned, you need to have libdbd drivers installed for the database backend you plan to use, and I believe you have to build GnuCash yourself to have GnuCash aware of the drivers—a requirement that prevents most Windows and Mac users from ever using them. Since you’re on Slackware, take a look at those two wiki pages and see if they help you.

David,

The requirement to build GnuCash yourself applies only to the Mac GnuCash.app bundle, and is because of linkage issues peculiar to older versions of MacOS. GnuCash itself doesn't need to be changed, it just needs the libdbd module for Postgres or MySQL/Maria; unfortunately until recently (MacOS X 10/Xcode 6) one needed to build everything to ensure that those modules would be compatible. I intend to change the way I build GnuCash.app for version 2.8 and will include all three libdbd modules in the bundle.

Regards,
John Ralls