I was hoping I could get some clarification on what a db really is and why I'm told that 2 different apps can't share a 1 db without one of the apps being rewritten.

My understanding of a db is that it's like a set of containers that hold different information (text, images, etc) to be called upon later. On our site we have 3 different db's. One for personal entry blogs of community members, one for our blog that we use to manage our content, and one for the forum. In each, readers can interact by leaving comments obviously. What I wanted to see happen is they all share the same db so that anytime an entry is made in either blog that it be shown in the forum and that comments can be left on either side.

Can someone tell me why this might be difficult or consuming task?

If you are using vendor software like most people (ex: phpBB, wordpress blog) then you probably have different databases set up for those to run on. Also, they may be set up to run on different DBMS (database management system) For example, phpBB could be running on mySQL and wordpress could be running on postgresql.

The problem with this is that these vendor projects are setup so that they are no aware of each other at all. Sharing data is not easy to do without delving into the internals of each program and trying to merge them together.

If these are all systems built by your company, then it -might- be easier to do in that you know how the systems work. Really though, if they were not built with working together in mind then the only advantage is that you know the individual systems better than vendor software. This is good, but can still be pretty unhelpful.

A lot of how they function would probably have to be reworked because they have their own users (this is probably the main thing) and the code itself was written to work with only that data and logic. (if a new blog is posted.. do blog stuff. It doesn't have code to do forum stuff).

Really.. I could go on and on, but I think the simplest path here is to sit down with you dev folks and talk to them. I am sure they will talk to you as much as you can stand

Ok, I guess my original understanding of db's was much too simple from what you've just explained. Yes, we're using wordpress and we're using phpizabi. We set it up ourselves so we don't have a Dev team to work with, we try to learn/resolve issues ourselves with the help of friendly forums and people.

Thank very much you for your time and insight, I appreciate it.

TOG

That being said

IF the client (front end) program has the capability of using ODBC or OleDB to connect to a database server instead of a local database, it may (repeat, may) be possible to set up a central db with an identical table structure as the current, local db, manually copy the data from the multiple databases on the client machines to the central server, and then configure the various clients to use the central server instead of a local database.