[Asterisk-Dev] Asterisk and Microsoft SQL Server, etc

[Martin List-Petersen]

On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 03:54, Jeremy Ward wrote:

>      1. Can asterisk utilize a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 instead of
>         mySQL? This would allow us to use our standard enterprise
>         database server along with all of it’s backup
>         procedures/hardware

There is ODBC support for most things, but i'm not sure, what you want
to use the SQL backend for ? There are quite a lot ways on how you can
use a SQL to Asterisk (or not). SQL is certainly not a requirement.

>      1. What sort of hardware should we use? Could a ProLiant 2500
>         with dual PII 300Mhz and 512MB Ram, RAID 5, etc, be sufficient
>         and for how many concurrent calls?

That depends on how many calls you want to handle, if you want to do
some transcoding, etc. If I remember correctly the figure for
transcoding Alaw to G.729 was about 100 concurrent channels on a Dual
Xeon P4 2,4 GHz machine, but the exact figure would be in the archives
somewhere. So don't expect too many concurrent calls (with transcoding)
through that box. Even kapejod tells to use a P3 500 MHz as absolute
minimum specs together with his bri cards.

So if this proliant box is for you own PABX, it's probably more than
suitable, if you want to use it for customers/reselling i would opt for
very much more recent hardware.

>      1. Is there any way to export billing information for credit
>         card/invoice billing and using what methodology?

You can either import text-based csv by script or use ODBC to store csv
billing data in the database. For prepaid most people are using custom
development (there is astcc though), but be prepared to write most of
your billing engine yourself (or hire someone).

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen