JIRA and Confluence by Atlassian

I've had the pleasure of helping the folks here at my shop get setup on JIRA and Confluence by Atlassian over the past few days. I created a new database on an internal server (along with all the necessary backups and monitoring) and we're off and running. We're using Oracle (even though one document advised against Oracle) and we got both tools to use the same user database tables.

Some comments:
- by default the products are installed with a hypersonicSQL (hsqldb) database, yuck. One of the docs called it "an in memory database which you shouldn't use in a production environment"
- JIRA looks to be pretty good, although I still yearn for my Test Director
- Confluence looks OK. It's only a Wiki and I don't see any benefits to it over some of the free Wiki's out there. We'll see if the two products integrate well (other then the single user data store).
- No Foreign Keys anywhere, it's hard for a data guy like me to like a product that that doesn't enforce referential integrity in the database.

I also noticed that creating reports in JIRA doesn't look too easy. It's probably just me being a newbie though.

Overall, JIRA looks good, Confluence looks iffy..

Until next time...Rich

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