Most of these cases turn out to be one of:

• missing JDBC driver
• invalid XML in server.xml or entityengine.xml
• wrong database username or password
• database permissions problem - e.g. can't create tables

I think a GUI interface to configure the database connection would make it easier for customers and help reduce the number of support cases. This GUI interface should be in two places:

1. In the installer, for the case when the customer wants to set up JIRA from the start to be using a proper database rather than HSQL.
2. In JIRA itself (in the administration interface), for the case when the customer has been evaluating JIRA using HSQL, and now wants to move to a real database to use JIRA in anger.

In this interface, we could ask the customer for:

• database type
• database server DNS name or IP address
• database name
• username
• password

We could use the database type to check whether the correct JDBC driver is in the classpath, and if not, we could prompt the user for the location of the JDBC driver (and we could copy it into common/lib). We should also ship with any JDBC drivers that we are allowed to (MySQL and Postgres?).

We could also test the connection to the database, giving the customer immediate feedback of whether their parameters are valid.

The connection wizard in DBVisualizer is a good example of such an interface.

I realize that there are technical issues to solve around whether you would then update app server config files (e.g. conf/server.xml) and entityengine.xml, or whether you would use a completely different mechanism to save the database connection configuration. But it is all do-able.