While it isn’t within the scope of this book to teach you about how to manage your databases, it is worth at least noting briefly some of the applications you could use to help with database management. Several exist, some of which are local client applications running from your computer and connecting to the database, and others of which are web-based applications that could be served from the same computer running the database itself, thereby allowing you to connect remotely.
Some of the ones we’ve used include:
phpMyAdmin (http://www.phpmyadmin.net)
MySQL Workbench (http://wb.mysql.com)
pgAdmin (http://www.pgadmin.org)
Navicat (commercial) (http://www.navicat.com)
When working with ODBC database connections and Asterisk,
it is important to remember that the ODBC connection abstracts some of
the information passed between Asterisk and the database. In cases where
things are not working as expected, you may need to enable logging on
your database platform to see what Asterisk is sending to the database
(e.g., what SELECT, INSERT, or UPDATE statements are being triggered from
Asterisk), what the database is
seeing, and why the database may be rejecting the statements.
For example, one of the most common
problems found with ODBC database integration is an incorrectly defined
table, or a missing column that Asterisk expects to exist. While great
strides have been made in the form of adaptive modules, not all parts of
Asterisk are adaptive. In the case of ODBC voicemail storage, you may
have missed a column such as flag,
which is a new column not previously found in versions of Asterisk prior
to 1.8.[142] In order to debug why your data is not being written to
the database as expected, you should enable statement logging on the
database side, and then determine what statement is being executed and
why the database is rejecting it.
[142] This was actually an issue one of the authors had while
working on this book, and the flag column was found by looking at the
statement logging during PostgreSQL testing.