Legacy Method for Configuring Data Sources

Owned by Jonathan Muse
Last updated: Sept 12, 2023
3 min read

By default, JIRA runs in Tomcat, so the following example applies to Tomcat only. To learn how to define data source, refer to the application server manual.

  1. Ensure that you have the SQL driver in JIRA_HOME/lib directory. The driver should be proper for the type of the (external to JIRA) database in use.

  2. Open the JIRA_HOME/conf/context.xml file in a text editor. Enter your data source there, for instance, between the existing tags <Context> </Context>:
    Hsqldb

    <Resource name="TestDB" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" username="sa" password="" driverClassName="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver" url="jdbc:hsqldb:/tmp/somedb;create=true;" <!-- Optional, but highly recommended, add here the limits for your SQL database connection pool --> maxTotal="20" maxIdle="5" maxWaitMillis="-1" />

  3. Restart your Jira. You should be now ready to use the data source you just defined.

Check the settings in the Resource tag:

  • name: Appears in the general parameters as Database(JNDI name)

  • username: Username for connecting to the database

  • password: Password for connecting to the database

  • driverClassName: Name of the class from the driver. The driver should be a proper jar archive for the type of the database used.
    In our example the type of the database used is hsqldb

  • url: The url used to connect to the database

Settings for Other Databases

PostgreSQL

<Resource name="TestDB" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" username="sa" password="" driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver" url="jdbc:postgresql://127.0.0.1:5432/somedb" />

MySQL

<Resource name="TestDB" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" username="sa" password="" driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" url="jdbc:mysql://127.0.0.1:3306/somedb" />

 

If you want to use a column alias in a select sql and use that alias instead of a column name you should add "?useOldAliasMetadataBehavior=true" as a configuration parameter in your JDBC url. This is due to a change in My SQL JDBC driver implementation starting with version 5.1.

You can find more details here.

If you use this parameter in combination with other parameters please also see this.

Oracle

MS SQL Server

 

For MS Sql Server 2000 the instance name should be omitted from the url even if you are connecting to a named instance. Thus, the url attribute should be: url="jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://localhost:1433/somedb".

AS400

Firebird

 

If want to connect to Jira database, you can see its configuration in the dbconfig.xml file from Jira's home directory.