Connecting JIRA to Sybase

1. Create a database user which JIRA will connect as (e.g. jirauser).
2. Create a database for JIRA to store issues in (e.g. jiradb).
3. Ensure that the user has permission to connect to the database, and create and populate tables.

1. Download the Sybase JDBC driver from http://jtds.sourceforge.net/
2. Add the Sybase JDBC driver jar (jtds-1.2.jar) to the common/lib/ directory.

1. Edit conf/server.xml (if you are using JIRA Standalone) and customise the username, password, driverClassName and url parameters for the Datasource. (If you are using JIRA WAR/EAR, edit the appropriate file on your application server; e.g. for Tomcat, edit conf/Catalina/localhost/jira.xml.)

   <Server port="8005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">
   
     <Service name="Catalina">
   
       <Connector port="8080"
         maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
         enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100" 
         connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" />
   
       <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">
         <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">
   
           <Context path="" docBase="${catalina.home}/atlassian-jira" reloadable="false">
             <Resource name="jdbc/JiraDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
               username="[enter db username]"
               password="[enter db password]"
           
               driverClassName="net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver"
           
               url="jdbc:jtds:sybase://yourmachinename:portnumber/jiradb"
               [ delete the minEvictableIdleTimeMillis and timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis params here ]
               />
   
             <Resource name="UserTransaction" auth="Container" type="javax.transaction.UserTransaction"
               factory="org.objectweb.jotm.UserTransactionFactory" jotm.timeout="60"/>
             <Manager className="org.apache.catalina.session.PersistentManager" saveOnRestart="false"/>
           </Context>
   
         </Host>
       </Engine>
     </Service>
   </Server>

   (Note: if you can't find this section at all, you've probably got the wrong file - search for mentions of 'jira' in the files under conf/.)

2. If you are using JIRA Standalone, edit conf/server.xml, and delete the minEvictableIdleTimeMillis and timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis attributes (which are only needed for HSQL, and degrade performance otherwise).

1. Edit atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/entityengine.xml (if you are using JIRA Standalone) or edit-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/entityengine.xml (JIRA WAR/EAR), and change the field-type-name attribute to sybase. (If you forget to do this and start JIRA, it may create database tables incorrectly. See this page if this happens to you.) Also delete the schema-name="PUBLIC" attribute:

   <!-- DATASOURCE - You will need to update this tag for your installation.
   
   -->
     <datasource name="defaultDS" field-type-name="sybase"
         schema-name="PUBLIC"
         helper-class="org.ofbiz.core.entity.GenericHelperDAO"
       check-on-start="true"
       use-foreign-keys="false"
       ...
       

   • If you are using JIRA WAR/EAR, your application server may require other changes to entityengine.xml (e.g. to customise the jndi-jdbc tag).
   • A user of JBoss and Sybase ASA 9.0.2 reported getting errors (e.g. com.sybase.jdbc2.jdbc.SybSQLException: ASA Error -195: Column 'PASSWORD_HASH' in table 'userbase' cannot be NULL) even after nulls were allowed (select * from systable where "option" like '%null%'). This was eventually resolved by modifying the JBoss datasource definition to include: <new-connection-sql> sp_dboption jira, "allow nulls by default", true </new-connection-sql>

You should now have an application server configured to connect to a database, and JIRA configured to use the correct database type. If you are using JIRA Standalone, start it up and watch the logs for any errors. If you are using the JIRA WAR/EAR distribution, rebuild and redeploy the webapp in your application server.

Have experiences to share with Sybase and JIRA? We welcome your thoughts. Please see the user-contributed Sybase notes.