SIARD Suite 2.2 - Prerequisites
A JAVA Runtime Environment (JRE) is a prerequisite for using SIARD Suite. A suitable database system infrastructure is a prerequisite for loading or storing database content
JAVA
Users can either download a SIARD Suite release package which includes a bundled JRE or, alternatively, install a JRE on their operating system. JAVA is freely available from http://www.java.com/ (JRE – JAVA Runtime Environment) or from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html (JDK - JAVA Development Kit). Note: SIARD Suite makes use of features of JavaFX which was integrated only in versions 8-10 of the JAVA distribution.
To find out whether a suitable JAVA version (8-10) is available under Windows, proceed as follows: In the Windows "Start" menu item, type the command "cmd" and enter "java -version" in the command window.
Architecture (32-bit/64-bit)
In former versions of SIARD Suite a dependency on ODBC necessitated the use of 32-bit JAVA for accessing MS Access databases. SIARD Suite 2.2 does not use ODBC for accessing MS Access databases anymore. Therefore, those databases can be accessed on any platform (e.g. LINUX) and SIARD Suite 2.2 is compatible with 32-bit JAVA as well as 64-bit JAVA. It is recommended to choose the JAVA architecture according to the architecture of your operating system.
Databases
SIARD Suite 2.2 currently supports the following database systems:
- MS Access 2007 or higher
- DB/2 8 or higher
- MySQL (or MariaDB) 5.5 or higher
- Oracle 10 or higher
- PostgreSQL 11 or higher
- SQL Server 2012 or higher
Further database systems may be integrated at a later date. The JDBC drivers of the database vendors usually do not conform to SQL:2008. Most of them even fail to conform to the JDBC 4 standard with respect to meta data or advanced data types. Therefore a JDBC wrapper needs to be developed for each database system, which conforms to the standards at least to the extent required by SIARD Suite.