Joomla: how to connect to an EXTERNAL DB

Installing and Configuring
  • Install the plugin called externaldb, then make sure you enable it!
  • In Plugin Manager, configure your external database details for the database(s) you need. 
    • DSN: Your name for the database to be used later on
    • Hostname: Host where the MySQL server is
    • Port Number: Defaults to 3306, but can change if needed
    • Username / Password : Authentication details for the database
    • Database Name: Name of the MySQL database to use
Implementing

The following code is a solution to using external databases. There is no way of using this without modifying some code. That out of the way, here's how to use it in that code.

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ExternalDB simply creates a new jDatabase object with your given connection details - nothing clever but simple to maintain connection details. Here's a sample of code from one of our components...

// Create new ExternalDB instance, using the details that we set earlier.  
// 'resultsDb' is what we called the DSN
$dbxo = new externaldatabase ( 'resultsDb' );  
// Create a new jDatabase object, connected with the details from the above selected DSN.  
// We call ExternalDB objects $dbx just as a standard practice
$dbx = $dbxo->getDB ();
$sql = "SELECT * FROM sport WHERE site = 2"; // Some simple SQL..
// Now you use your ExternalDB object in exactly the same way as you would the regular DB object..
$dbx->setQuery ( $sql );
$dbx->query ();
$res = $dbx->loadAssocList ();