A lot of effort has gone into designing and interfacing with the database in version 3, so I thought I’d share a little insight into some of the improvements we’ve made over version 2.

We’ve beefed up the database by making use of transactions, which allow us to add, edit, or remove items from the database with the ability to undo those changes should something go wrong. Because of this we’ve made the switch from a MyISAM storage engine to InnoDB (the default for MySQL as of version 5.5), making Blesta ACID-ic.

Another major improvement is the use of UTF8 collation, which will now allow users to more easily search the database in their native tongue as well as input and output data without conversion. This is a huge improvement for developers, and we are all about developers with version 3.

Speaking of developers, another great improvement is the introduction of the Record component. The record component is a database access object that creates queries using a series of method calls. Never again will you have to worry about which comes first, GROUP BY or ORDER BY.

In addition, the Record component uses the PDO library, making queries safe and secure. But that’s not the only benefit of PDO. Can we say “multi-database support”, as in MSSQL, PostgreSQL, and others? Well, no, not at the moment, but that’s definitely a possibility.

From the Developer Documentation: