Improve Drupal's Database Abstraction Layer Extensibility and Capabilities

Created on 24 January 2017, over 8 years ago

Updated 28 May 2025, about 1 month ago

Background

Drupal's Database Abstraction Layer (DBAL) has had few improvements from Drupal 7. Many of the improvements to querying data in Drupal 8 lie in the Storage and Entity Query APIs.

Problem/Motivation

If we want to continue to use our own DBAL, we need to make it more extensible so that new database features can be added and prototyped. Features that are hard to implement:

Creating your own database driver is hard and requires manual processes for users.
Overriding an existing database driver without modifying settings/services or overriding Connection.
Database platforms provide new features and functionality, but Drupal is stuck on the lowest common version ( ✨ PostgreSQL: Support JSON data type Closed: duplicate , Native Upsert support in PostgreSQL 9.5).
Transaction support is very limited #2572283: Neither REPEATABLE READ nor READ COMMITTED transaction isolation levels are always appropriate → , #2236395: extended db_transaction / Database::Connection::startTransaction to include isolation level → , 📌 Transactions should be allowed to be committed explicitly Needs work . Many of these are very difficult to get through the core queue and linger forever.
Minor, but #2605284: Testing framework does not work with contributed database drivers →
Our implementation is incomplete, for example the Update query doesn't support joins.
For the full support contrib database driver for MongoDB the driver really needs to have module capabilities. The driver overrules a lot of the default classes for Storage, Entity Storage and Entity Query. Also it overrides a lot of Migrate and Views classes/plugins. The driver also needs to create a number of new services. Also to make the it all work the driver module needs to be the first module to be installed (even before the system module). See: https://gitlab.com/daffie/mongodb.
()

Full list of DBAL issues: DBAL issues →

Questions

How do we provide capability/feature detection for Database drivers and maintain automated testing support. Doing this should help with being able to get and resolve new DBAL features in core.
Do we kill DBTNG and implement Doctrine/DBAL (See 📌 Consider using Doctrine ORM for Entities Closed: won't fix )? DBAL has some missing features/nice-to-haves that Drupal's DBAL has.
- @mondrake has an experimental Drupal database driver wrapped around Doctrine/DBAL: https://github.com/mondrake/drudbal

Proposed resolution

None yet. Collecting ideas and planning.

✨ Feature request

Status

Active

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

database system

Created by

🇺🇸United States mradcliffe USA

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Needs framework manager review
It is used to alert the framework manager core committer(s) that an issue significantly impacts (or has the potential to impact) multiple subsystems or represents a significant change or addition in architecture or public APIs, and their signoff is needed (see the governance policy draft for more information). If an issue significantly impacts only one subsystem, use Needs subsystem maintainer review instead, and make sure the issue component is set to the correct subsystem.

Amsterdam2019

Contrib database driver

Incomplete comments

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Comment about 1 month ago →
🇳🇿New Zealand quietone
The Ideas project is being deprecated. This issue is moved to the Drupal project. Check that the selected component is correct. Also, add the relevant tags, especially any 'needs manager review' tags.

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