Catalog Services
This chapter is intended to be a technical discussion of the Catalog services and as such is not targeted at end users but rather at developers and system administrators that want or need to know more of the working details of Bacula.
The Bacula Catalog services consist of the programs that provide the SQL database engine for storage and retrieval of all information concerning files that were backed up and their locations on the storage media.
We have investigated the possibility of using the following SQL engines for Bacula: Beagle, mSQL, GNU SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MySQL. Each presents certain problems with either licensing or maturity. At present, we have chosen for development purposes to use MySQL and PostgreSQL. MySQL was chosen because it is fast, proven to be reliable, widely used, and actively being developed. MySQL is released under the GNU GPL license. PostgreSQL was chosen because it is a full-featured, very mature database, and because Dan Langille did the Bacula driver for it. PostgreSQL is distributed under the BSD license.
The Bacula SQL code has been written in a manner that will allow it to be easily modified to support any of the current SQL database systems on the market (for example: mSQL, iODBC, unixODBC, Solid, OpenLink ODBC, EasySoft ODBC, InterBase, Oracle8, Oracle7, and DB2).
If you do not specify either --with-mysql or --with-postgresq on
the ./configure line, Bacula will use its minimalist internal
database. This database is kept for build reasons but is no longer
supported. Bacula requires one of the three databases (MySQL,
PostgreSQL, or SQLite) to run.