Drupal loves NoSQL databases or how to serve 1 million entities out of a Drupal website

Drupal loves NoSQL databases or how to serve 1 million entities out of a Drupal website

Drupal is a great CMS! It uses SQL databases which help us to build powerful views in a few minutes.
SQL databases are great but they don't fit each use case. NoSQL databases have the ability to become larger and much more powerful, making them the preferred choice for large or constantly evolving data sets.

Unfortunately Drupal core doesn't support NoSQL databases and this is an often reason why the Drupal databases often become the performance bottleneck of your websites. Fortunately there is a module for that!

The module is called External entities. It takes advantage of the fact that Drupal Entity API is database agnostic and allow us to use external databases. While content lives external, Drupal sees those remote entities as internal. This makes it possible to alter the field displays, add references, comments, path aliases, share buttons, web shop products and more.

During this session we will talk about our recent experience with the module to serve about 1 000 000 entities out of Elastic Search. Why we have decided to do so?! Also we will talk about the benefits and caveats of using this solution.
Finally we will give you some nice ideas of what else you can achieve with this module.

*Session Materials*