Improving MSSQL backend support with Microsoft

[vwarchu]

Hello,

My name is Warren, a development manager for several Microsoft-backed MSSQL connectivity teams. I'd like to collaborate with this repo's maintainers on how Microsoft can best improve MSSQL backend support. I'm hoping to discuss this opportunity at your convenience - please reach out to me at v-warrenchu@microsoft.com and we can discuss.

Thank you!

[sarahnovotny]

Hello project maintainers, thank you for all the work you've done with Django to support MSSQL. We at Microsoft want to help make the end user experience even better with Django and MSSQL. Are you open to MS earning our place in this project? @OskarPersson, you seem to be the most recent major contributor. Could you reach out to Warren above and see if there are areas where we could help?

[alaskanpuffin]

@vwarchu @sarahnovotny Not sure if anything became of this thread, but what is the possibility of Microsoft starting their own official integration? Microsoft SQL is one of the only remaining major unofficial databases for Django, and it would help a lot having an integration that supports the most recent Django version.

[randlet]

Just wanted to voice my opinion that having "official" support for an SQL Server driver in Django would be fantastic. Django is great for writing intranet apps, but the lack of a stable SQL Server database backend is a barrier to adoption since many businesses run on Microsoft. I'm extremely grateful to have a third party backend available at all but having support from Microsoft or even getting an MSSQL backend into Django proper would be great!

[vwarchu]

Hi @alaskanpuffin , @randlet - thanks for your interest. We've recently released a project fork at https://github.com/microsoft/mssql-django as an alpha version. The beta version will be released soon with support for Django 3.1.

We're excited to provide Microsoft-backed support to Django on SQL Server (and Azure SQL DB) and look forward to working with the community!

[randlet]

@vwarchu That is awesome news! Thanks for the heads up and I'm looking forward to testing it out.

[sparrowt]

Thank you @vwarchu, I'm pleased to hear this!

One question, I noticed the license of the fork has been changed from BSD 3-Clause to MIT - may I ask from whom you obtained permission to alter the license?

History of LICENSE through chain of forks (BSD, with varying authors): django-pyodbc, django-pyodbc-azure, django-mssql-backend

[vwarchu]

@sparrowt - thanks for pointing this out, we'll put this through a legal review process to evaluate reverting to the BSD 3-Clause.

[sparrowt]

@vwarchu thanks for getting back to me, appreciate that. I've filed microsoft/mssql-django#15 just so there is somewhere to track this process rather than it getting lost in this comment thread on a different repo.