I’m exploring Omeka S for an NGO - their hosting can only have one MySQL database (it’s a shared hosting amongst several NGOs), and I’m having some limitations due to the absence of prefix in Omeka S database structure: I have an other group of tables that use the same table names.
There was a discussion between 2018 and 2020 on this topic: Database prefix, which ended on jimsafley writing that some exploration may be needed to check if it is feasible to use prefixes.
S still doesn’t support a prefix, and it’s unlikely that it will.
For various reasons the tooling and so on that S is built on assumes it has its own database to play in, and that’s why we didn’t/don’t have prefix support. And at this point that’s baked in all over the place: as one example that’s probably most problematic, into all the modules that install tables.
Is it really not possible for the shared host to provision a second database in this case? Certainly on the MySQL side having two that are assigned to the same user is not problematic (or having a second user account).
Just a note for the record - I’ve been discussing the prefix issue with a group of system admin in research teams I’m involved with: I wanted to explore with them if there was an appetite to try Omeka S for some of the projects I’m participating in.
And it’s a hard “no go”: for them, the absence of prefix is a security issue. They told me that even if they have one database per project, they have a strong preference for system that allow prefixing table names and they’ve made the decision not to implement any new system that doesn’t allow for it.