3.6. Databases in APR/Apache

Readers of a certain age will recollect a time in the 1980s when every application for the PC came bundled with hundreds of different printer drivers on ever-growing piles of floppy disks. Eventually, the operating system implemented the sensible solution: a unified printing API, so that each printer had a single driver, and each application had a single print function that works with any driver.

The history of database support in Apache echoes this evolutionary path. At first, Apache had no database support, so every module needing it had to implement it. Apache 1.3 offered separate, yet virtually identical modules for authentication with NDBM and Berkeley DB, and a whole slew of different (third-party) authentication modules for popular SQL databases such as MySQL. Similarly, every scripting language—such as Perl, PHP and Python—had its own database management.