Comment 7 for bug 1081947

Sorry about the frustration. We try to fix issues as soon as we can, but we've got limited resources. :(

Really the main limitation on MySQL support is that the Mahara lead developers, my employer Catalyst IT (http://www.catalyst.net.nz), is an organization that primarily uses Postgres. So, pretty much the entirety of our paid Mahara development work is done on Postgres, because that's what all our clients are using, and consequently MySQL-specific work has to come out of our non-funded general bug fixing time, or from community code contributions. We do have one Mahara client running MySQL now, though, so you may see more active MySQL bug fixing in the future.

We would welcome a patch for this issue. On a quick search through the code base I see only about 12 instances of CAST() still present, so in theory it shouldn't be too much work to solve.

I haven't migrated a large site from MySQL to Postgres before, so I can't offer any specific insights into the process. There is a page about it on the Postgres site: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Converting_from_other_Databases_to_PostgreSQL . There was also a comment thread about it on mahara.org recently, in which Dajan suggested checking the Moodle forums for advice, since it does come up there occasionally. https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=5573

Sorry I can't be of more help!