Currently I have a DB structure in MySQL with a few dozen tables with various foreign key linkages among them. All of the data is in files that I’m going to load in, so I’m hoping I can port the design over to a storage system that works with Drupal 7, since I can simply setup something (using the Feeds module?) to get my data in a way that Drupal 7 likes. The ultimate purpose of this is for lots of manual human revision, linking together entries in tables with relations and possibly revising some field data that looks wrong. So the whole goal is to make the human interface for viewing and editing (particularly adding) relations in Drupal 7. The question is, what is the proper way for the data to be stored so I have to write as little module code as needed?
It seems to me that I would choose one of 3 modules to accomplish this task:
- Relation
- Entity Reference
- Data
Relation and Entity Reference would allow me to store all of my data in nodes (entities?) in Drupal 7, so Drupal would have “native support” for handling all of the stuff. However, I expect there to be 100s of millions to low billions of nodes with perhaps up to ~3 relations to other nodes in each. How efficiently does Relation or Entity Reference handle this when referencing foreign data (and perhaps grabbing referenced data from that reference, and so on) with Views and the like? Can they support a node having a null reference, since many will be null until a user can set them (so I’d need a way to also have a view to find nodes with particular null references)?
Data is another possibility, but it’s in alpha and I wonder about its stability and efficiency. It also seems to me that having all of my data stored in an external MySQL database instead of in Drupal nodes defeats the entire purpose of using Drupal in the first place. Is my feeling on this correct?
I’m having a difficult time nailing down what I would need to manage my content, which seems odd considering Drupal 7 is a CMS. I have to be missing something here, but I’m not sure what it is. What is the most mature module(s?) for handling/interfacing with this large quantity of inter-related data and being able to go through and have a user mostly setting up and managing the links (so “foreign keys”) between “tables”, along with perhaps field data review and revision? Are there any that would suffice?
If your need the Data to display, another model will not help you. You might need some Pagination or give your query an maximum depth of recursion to load only the entities you are interested in. I guess using something that is already supported will save you a lot of work.
Without benchmarks you can barely find your bottlenecks. So go the easiest way which seems to be the Entity References and optimize as needed. You can create some test data to find limitations early. But there will be ways to optimize the requests later for sure.