Supported database features

OneSpan Authentication Server uses a limited set of database features to support as many relational database management systems (RDBMS) as possible:

• Tables (relations) with the following data types:

  • INTEGER (32-bit)

  • VARCHAR is used for columns that store character strings up to 1024 characters.

    On Microsoft SQL Server this is NVARCHAR for Unicode support.

    On Oracle, the used data type is VARCHAR2 if the Oracle default character set specified in NLS_CHARACTERSET is AL32UTF8. For every other character set, the data type NVARCHAR2 is used.

  • LONGVARCHAR or TEXT (depending on the database type) is used for columns that store character strings with more than 1024 characters if required by the database.

    On Microsoft SQL Server the data type TEXT is used for columns over 8000 characters.

    On Oracle the data type is CLOB if the database character set is configured to support Unicode, and NCLOB otherwise (to use the national character set if set to a Unicode character set).

  • TIMESTAMP (this is not an automatically generated time stamp, but just a date/time field). On Oracle this uses a precision of 1 ms. On Microsoft SQL Server the data type DATETIME is used. On MariaDB the data type DATETIME is used with a precision of 1 ms.
• Primary key constraints
• Foreign key constraints, using the default action (restrict) and cascade delete
• ANSI Standard SQL Data Manipulation Language (DML) – SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, without any vendor-specific syntax
• Transactions with simple COMMIT and ROLLBACK (no save points or equivalents)

To support a specific DBMS, OneSpan Authentication Server requires an ODBC level 3 driver that supports the following:

• Multi-threaded access using multiple concurrent connections
• Wide char (Unicode) parameters for input and output

OneSpan Authentication Server supports the following ODBC databases to use as its data store:

• MariaDB 10.11.5

  OneSpan Authentication Server is fully compatible with data-at-rest encryption as provided by MariaDB.

• Oracle Database 19c

  OneSpan Authentication Server is fully compatible with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) as provided by Oracle Database to protect data at rest (tablespace encryption).

• Microsoft SQL Server

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2022
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2019
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2017
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2016

  OneSpan Authentication Server supports the SQLServer AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature for Microsoft SQL Server versions 2022, 2019, 2017, and 2016.

  OneSpan Authentication Server is fully compatible with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) as provided by Microsoft SQL Server to protect data at rest.

  OneSpan Authentication Server supports the following ODBC drivers:

  • Microsoft ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server
  • Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server
  • Microsoft ODBC Driver 13.1 for SQL Server

Unicode support

At a minimum, the database ODBC driver must allow the wide char parameters to be used. However, the underlying database does not necessarily need to be configured with Unicode support. The database only needs to be able to handle the characters that are actually used.

If you do want full Unicode support in the database, refer to the database vendor's instructions. Normally, a database has to be created with Unicode storage from the start. Depending on the database type, some of the columns in the database need to be increased in size, to handle multi-byte UTF-8 encoded data. The database documentation should indicate whether VARCHAR columns are defined by number of characters or number of bytes.