By default Sakai 2.9 distributions (demo, binary, source) are configured to use an in-memory version of HSQLDB on start up. HSQLDB is deprecated for Sakai 10 and later.

Many developers and the vast majority of Sakai installations choose to run either MySQL or Oracle in their local and production environments and the default and sample sakai.properties include configuration settings for both databases. Click the "Configure" tab above for instructions on setting up Sakai to use MySQL or Oracle. For MySQL download https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/about-mariadb-connector-j/ and copy into the lib directory.

You will not need to create Sakai database objects (tables, indices, etc) when setting up your database. Sakai generates its own database schema automatically during the Tomcat setup process via the autoDDL setting in sakai.properties.

Database default configuration (2.x)