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GNU Health Federation Information System moves from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

Item posted by Luis Falcon <meanmicio> on Tue 12 Feb 2019 10:18:59 PM UTC.

Dear all

Thalamus is one of the components of the GNU Health project. It is the GNU Health Federation message and authentication server, and currently connects to MongoDB to manage the demographics and health data from all the participating nodes of the Federation.

As you may know, by the end of 2018, MongoDB decided to change license of the server to their Server Side Public License (SSPL)
(https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/mongodb-now-released-under-the-server-side-public-license)

Due to the license change in MongoDB, many GNU/Linux distributions are no longer including the mongodb server (see references)

SSPL has not gotten the approval from OSI, and the Free Software Foundation is still reviewing it, but they have expressed concerns.

Versions of MongoDB server previous to October 2018 are still on GPL v3, but, sadly, MongoDB will no longer maintain them. No bugs fixes or security patches will be provided under this GPL license.

The combination of license change, rejection of large part of the Libre software community and the immediate end of support from GPL versions of MongoDB forced us to look for an alternative fast. I have taken the decision to move to a community-based platform that delivers the current GNU Health Federation functionality.

In this context, after evaluating different possibilities and listening to the community, I have chosen PostgreSQL to interact with Thalamus. PostgreSQL is a solid, community-based database server. The recent JSON(B) support provides the flexibility and scalability found in document oriented engines.

GNU Health has been using PostgreSQL since 2008 for its Hospital Management System functionality, so we are familiar with it. We are excited and looking forward to adopting PostgreSQL as our Person Master Index and Health Information System.

Development of the upcoming Thalamus server supporting PostreSQL has already started, and technical documentation will be updated accordingly.

All the best
--
Dr. Luis Falcon, M.D., BSc
President, GNU Solidario
GNU Health: Freedom and Equity in Healthcare
http://health.gnu.org
GPG Fingerprint :ACBF C80F C891 631C 68AA 8DC8 C015 E1AE 0098 9199

References:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915537#15
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/IQIOBOGWJ247JGKX2WD6N27TZNZZNM6C/
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1122267