Hello, I'm new on this list. I've got a question about Drupal.
There is a large, existing database of documents (about 300.000 right at the moment, but other databases of comparable dimension might be added). This database is to be "integrated" into drupal somehow, so that Users could comment on documents, add new ones, rate them etc.
The database contains not only document data, but also a wealth of metadata (hierarchical and causal relations, timestamps, versioning, authorship information, several distinct categories of documents - and some more).
While this all sounds a lot like Drupal nodes already, i fear that just converting every document to a node would lose some of the metainformation and possibly break some features of drupal due to sheer number of documents.
Would it be possible to have Drupal access that database directly instead of "nodes"? That way we'd probably save a lot of hassle.
Would that be possible using a module?
Any help appreciated,
Basti
Basti
Assuming the existing database is compatible with Drupal (e.g. MySQL or Postgres, etc), it is relatively straightforward to expose another table to Drupal through hook_views_data.
Your other option is to create a new content type that adds all the various metadata fields and then use the Migrate module to convert from the old database into Drupal content.
While 300,000 nodes is a good size, drupal.org has several times that many nodes.
Gregg Marshall, CPMR, CSP, CMC
-----Original Message----- From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On Behalf Of Bastiaan Zapf Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2012 11:23 AM To: support@drupal.org Subject: [support] Integrating a large, given Database into Drupal
Hello, I'm new on this list. I've got a question about Drupal.
There is a large, existing database of documents (about 300.000 right at the moment, but other databases of comparable dimension might be added). This database is to be "integrated" into drupal somehow, so that Users could comment on documents, add new ones, rate them etc.
The database contains not only document data, but also a wealth of metadata (hierarchical and causal relations, timestamps, versioning, authorship information, several distinct categories of documents - and some more).
While this all sounds a lot like Drupal nodes already, i fear that just converting every document to a node would lose some of the metainformation and possibly break some features of drupal due to sheer number of documents.
Would it be possible to have Drupal access that database directly instead of "nodes"? That way we'd probably save a lot of hassle.
Would that be possible using a module?
Any help appreciated,
Basti -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
Am 09.01.2012 04:50, schrieb Gregg Marshall:
Dear Gregg,
thank You for Your kind reply.
I do not understand hook_views_data completely for now, but it appears to be the hook i was looking for.
I still hope we can do it without migrating the whole database to drupal. There's more to that than the number of nodes. My first concern would be that there are quite a few databases of this kind and that a "drupal accesses an external storage of documents" scenario would at least give some control over unification of these documents.
While 300,000 nodes is a good size, drupal.org has several times that many nodes.
I do not doubt that drupal respectively the underlying database could handle those numbers, it's more like: once we migrate everything, we're going to have to live with that migration like forever. I do not want that. I couldn't even responsibly decide if a migration were "good" (that is, not lose any data that is thought important).
As you might suspect, there's a lot of politics in this setting.
Good night,
Basti
Herr Zapf:
You might want to just use the existing multiple database solutions to start with - perhaps, with "freshness" in mind, working off a slave database. After you have this working, you might look at some kind of actual migration (it would be a bit faster), perhaps utilizing feeds, which can be done with no loss of data.
Dealing with the politics is always an important part of the solution.
Nancy Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.
From: Bastiaan Zapf
I still hope we can do it without migrating the whole database ... there are quite a few databases of this kind and that a "drupal accesses an external storage of documents" scenario would at least give some control over unification of these documents.
While 300,000 nodes is a good size, drupal.org has several times that many nodes.
I do not doubt that drupal respectively the underlying database could handle those numbers, it's more like: once we migrate everything, we're going to have to live with that migration like forever. I do not want that. I couldn't even responsibly decide if a migration were "good" (that is, not lose any data that is thought important).
As you might suspect, there's a lot of politics in this setting.
-
Bastiaan Zapf -
Gregg Marshall -
Ms. Nancy Wichmann