[support] Seeking Advice on Integrating drupal

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On Mon, 26 May 2008 18:06:21 -0400
"Christopher M. Jones" <cjones at partialflow.com> wrote:


> The product catalog should remain fairly stable. It's mainly stock
> (price, availability, location) that needs to come from the MSSQL
> db. Prices and availability are managed on site using a custom VB
> app that talks to the MSSQL server. Quantities, pricing, and
> locations are constantly changing and need to be accurate to the
> second. 

That looks tricky and that's exactly why I decided to put the
business logic into the DB.
Especially if you want to be sure that the order is going to be
closed with quantities accurate to the second, you'll need some
locking mechanism across 2 DB.
Then if your DB are in different places latency problem won't make
keeping the thing running easier.

> Another tricky piece is going to be a 'sell cart' in addition to
> the traditional 'buy cart'. I foresee this requiring some hacking.
> Does anyone have initial thoughts on this?

It start to look as if you're going to implement your own e-commerce
engine.
In Ubercart products are nodes. That means they "should" reside in
Drupal DB. If you need "accurate to the second" quantities you'll
have to see how Ubercart closes the order and update the inventory.
Its design may not be suited for "accurate to the second" inventory
management or may just be hard to be converted to a multi DB system.

One thing is "on demand" check of inventory status, another is
closing an order coherently... or you may rethink your constraint
and specification.

The core of Ubercart cart "workflow" is actually workflow-ng module
that doesn't look to use any lock on the DB, nor transactions, making
it pretty hard to transform a basket into an order, saving the
correct inventory quantities and updating them with an accuracy "to
the second".

Ubercart and workflow-ng are pretty impressive pieces of software...
and may save you hundreds hours of programming if you're really not
that concerned of "accurate to the second" quantities, pricing...
and the probability and cost of getting into troubles is acceptable.
Consider that the probability of getting into troubles is going to
increase if you'll use 2 DB.

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it