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 ();