1.1 Overview
n this section, you will find a brief description of the DBMS features, along with
installation instructions and a few samples.
While the DBMS and mail-merge functions were designed to work together, they can
also be used independently from each other. That is, you may find the DBMS support
useful even if you have no need for mail-merge functionality, and likewise you can use
the mail-merge functions without a DBMS back-end. Both functions require LISTSERV
Classic or LISTSERV HPO, and are unavailable in LISTSERV Lite.
Note: Embedded mail merge is the default for LISTSERV 14.5 and following.
1.1.1 DBMS support
LISTSERV's DBMS support allows you to:
• Direct LISTSERV to store subscriber information in a DBMS, on a list by list basis.
That is, you may have a mix of traditional LISTSERV lists and DBMS lists.
Furthermore, you can adjust the layout of your DBMS lists to match existing or
current applications. You can map each list to a private table if this is what makes
sense for you, or you can put all the lists in the same table, place related lists in one
table, etc. You can add as many columns as you want to store additional information
about subscribers.
• Use the DBMS as a back-end for mail-merge jobs. LISTSERV can execute arbitrary
SQL SELECT statements to extract recipients from your DBMS, and make related
information (name, country, account number, etc.) available for mail-merge
operations.
DBMS support is available through Microsoft's ODBC interface on Windows 2000 and
greater, and Oracle's OCI interface on OpenVMS Alpha, Digital Unix, AIX and Solaris
(SPARC only). Additionally, DB2 is supported natively (i.e. via CLI) under the unixes
which are supported by both DB2 and LISTSERV.
L-Soft formally supports SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008 as a datastore for mailing
lists.
L-Soft formally supports Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g, and 11g as a datastore for mailing lists.
L-Soft does not support Microsoft Access (any version) as a datastore for mailing lists.
1.1.2 Why require Oracle 8 or higher?
While this is probably no longer an issue for most Oracle customers, we are leaving this
section in for historical purposes.
Oracle introduced major changes to the OCI API in version 8. While many of the concepts
remain similar, all the function calls have been renamed and most have a different calling
sequence. Supporting both OCI 7 and OCI 8 would require more than a handful of #ifdef
statements – we would need to develop and support a separate interface for OCI 7. In
I
Section 1 DBMS and Mail-Merge Support
LISTSERV®, version 16.0 Advanced Topics Manual
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addition, we would need to license Oracle 7 on all supported systems, which would
significantly increase our development costs. While we recognize that there is a large
Oracle 7 installed base, a year or so from now most of them will have upgraded to Oracle
8, thus the cost for developing an OCI 7 interface and purchasing six Oracle 7 licenses
would have to be amortized over a period of about a year, leading to much higher
licensing costs for the OCI 7 version. Furthermore, it is possible to use LISTSERV's OCI
interface with an Oracle 7 server: the only component which must be at version 8 is the
client, i.e. SQL*Net. As Oracle-based LISTSERV installations typically run on a separate,
dedicated system, this simply means that you need to purchase a version 8 or higher
client license for the system in question. It is not necessary to upgrade the server to
Oracle 8 or higher. Oracle 7 is also supported through the ODBC interface.
As noted above, L-Soft formally supports Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g, and 11g
1.1.3 Mail-Merge
Documented Restriction: In order to use the mail-merge features, you must set the site
configuration variable EMBEDDED_MAIL_MERGE to a value of 1 (that is, enabled).
This is the default.
LISTSERV's mail-merge support allows you to send individually customized messages
to large numbers of recipients with very high throughput. The mail-merge functions
support:
• Simple substitutions, such as "Dear &firstname;".
• Conditional blocks, such as a birthday greeting sent when the message happens to
coincide with the recipient's birthday, or a warning when the balance of the account
is negative.
• Special facilities to send promotional banners to a randomly generated subset of the
recipients. For instance, you can indicate that a first banner should be sent to a
random subset of 200 recipients, while another banner is sent to a randomly
selected (but distinct) series of 500 recipients, and others receive a third banner, or
no banner at all.
• Easy support for "few of many" topic subscription, such as a service offering news
about movie actors (many registered actors, while most people will only want news
about a handful of them).
• Full integration with the DBMS interface, allowing recipients to be selected through
arbitrary SELECT statements, while every column that can be converted to a
character string is made available as a mail-merge field.
• A simple bounce processing and collection system – LISTSERV processes and
decodes all bounces, and writes the failing addresses to a plain-text file. You can
group related mailings in the same bounce file or use a separate file for each
mailing, whichever makes the most sense in your context. As each message is sent
in "probe" format, even non-standard bounces will be processed accurately, as long
as the remote MTA sends bounces to the correct (RFC821 MAIL FROM:) address.
1.2 Pre-Installation Tasks
Before installing DBMS and mail-merge support, please review the following steps and
make sure that your selected target system is ready to receive this update.
• DBMS support requires version 1.8d or later of LISTSERV Classic or Classic HPO
(DB2 support requires version 1.8e or later).
• Mail-merge support requires LISTSERV Classic or Classic HPO with
EMBEDDED_MAIL_MERGE set to 1 (enabled) in the site configuration file.
• If you are planning to use the DBMS interface, you must install vendor-supplied
DBMS support files on the target machine before installing the LISTSERV update.
For ODBC (Windows), the appropriate drivers are already installed as part of the
operating system under supported versions of Windows. For OCI, you need to install
and configure the Oracle8 client files (SQL*Net et al.) The OCI material is typically
licensed and not freely redistributable, and thus does not come with the LISTSERV
kit. (Note that OCI is not supported natively by LISTSERV under Windows, but can
be accessed via ODBC.)
• If you are using Windows, you must be running at least Windows 2000 with Service
Pack 4 applied. Windows NT 4.0 is no longer supported. The current Windows
installation kits query the operating system for the current version and service pack,
and will abort the installation if you are not running the minimum required version. LSoft
no longer supports Windows NT. Windows 2000 (Server and Workstation),
Windows 2003 Server, and Windows XP (Professional and Home) are currently
supported.
• If using the DBMS interface, you may want to create a DBMS username for
LISTSERV in advance, and grant it the CREATE SESSION (mandatory) and
CREATE TABLE (optional) privileges. If you are planning to create all tables
yourself, you should not grant CREATE TABLE to LISTSERV's DBMS username.
• A compiler is required to use the OCI interface on unix systems. L-Soft may not
legally ship pre-linked executables containing the SQL*Net library.
• A compiler is also required to use the CLI interface on AIX, for similar reasons.
to be continue...................................
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