Hello fellow Drupal fanatics,
I have been struggling on a project for a few days now and i'm not seeing the bright light at the end of the tunnel yet. Now i'm hoping that some of you die hard Drupal coders can give me some direction here.
The project involves incorporating a large ammount of data into Drupal. Because of the ammount of items that need to be imported we did some investigation about creating our own entity. Creating nodes with extra fields would give us an enormous and slow database because every extra field would create two new tables in the database.
To make things a bit more complex, the data i have to incorporate into Drupal is a relational database with a lot of 1 to N relations. The base table with objects holds over 50k records and every record has at least one ore multiple relations with other tables.
Let's say we have an building that has multiple functions (home, office, school), multiple addresses (streetname 1a, streetname 1b, streetname 1c), multiple owners, etc. For this example i have 4 tables; one for the object, one for the functions, one for the addresses and one for the owners. Relations between tables are setup with ID's.
In code the object would look like this:
<?php
$object = array(
//Data from the base table
'object_id' => '1',
'title' => 'Name of the building',
'coordinate_x' => '1234',