I’ve recently started helping out with limesurvey project, more specifically, their rewrite to CakePHP. One of the latest tickets I help with was to add optional table prefix, so you could have separate installations using the same database.
This is something you would never see in Django world, where everyone can afford as many databases as they have apps and you don’t have such artificial limits.
After discussing the topic of adding support for this, with all the problems it comes with, the reality is pretty grim – while we might have access to a number of servers, most of the [limesurvey] users are on cheap or simply outdated PHP hosting plans and still need this hack.
This is important because if we want to build great open-source application, we have to consider our end users and with it, their ecosystem of apps that they use. If you’re building a PHP software, you just can’t afford to not have table prefixes.
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