When pulling data from external sources, I simply don't use the drupal database abstraction layer at all. It doesn't have an ick factor for me at all. I use the approach your talking about with great success at my university. We connect to Oracle and MSSql to get external data, and as a result have built quite a nice portal using drupal as the application development framework. Good luck. Dave On Jul 7, 2009, at 10:07 AM, bobbrazeau@gmail.com wrote:
Hey guys, I realize this is a hot button issue and am not trying to ruffle any feathers.
We are looking to switch out website from a lamp stack to a CMS and Drupal is the one I am championing. The site itself would be running on a mysql cluster. One of the issues of our environment is some data sits on a MS SQL server. Currently we have it setup to connect via odbc and everything is fine.
While we wouldn't need Drupal to use MS SQL as a backend server, there is data some we'd need to grab for some of the pages. D6 doesn't support MSSQL though the abstraction layer, but would it be possible to code the modules to connect to the server on their own and use php code to process the db data? And what is the ick factor on that? NOT for MSSQL but the approach - or if there is a better way please inform me.
Thanks!
Bob