Reporting - how to get custom data out of ezpub database?

Saturday 01 March 2008 7:49:17 pm

I work for a small company that is considering using ezpub as our enterprise content management tool. It has all the cms functionality we need and more. However, we have some concerns around ezpub's OO database and extracting data for reporting.

My company's business is to book events online. We book about 50,000 events per year, with a user base of 20,000 users that belong to 35,000 organizations that then roll up into about 50 clients. We store a lot of data, probably close to 500,000 records.

We are in talks with a local web shop to customize ezpub as our web scheduling application.

Our daily business depends heavily on the ability of the IT dept to deliver reports including all the data points listed above. We have some concerns that nearly all our custom data points will be stored in what amounts to 4-5 tables in ezpub (ezcontentclass, ezcontentobject, etc.).

Can anyone provide input regarding extracting data from the ezpub db for custom reporting (BI suites like Pentaho, MS, etc.) ? Is it even possible? If so, does it take a lot of effort in an writing ETLs to separate my data from the ezpub object data?

This is a huge issue for us and I would appreciate any input from users who have experience using the ezpub database for custom reporting.

Thanks.

Sunday 02 March 2008 3:46:30 am

That is all possible plus more - you can extend eZ Publish to handle data with eZ API rather than though presentation layer. Also, the content model is not that difficult once you've learned how eZ Publish handles content, so then you can directly pull from the DB in any way that suits you.

One question, though, to Felix and other experienced developers is: should those 500000 records be attempted to be managed with that model? Would you go for that? Or would you choose some sort of integration or extension with dedicated DB tables and interfaces? Looks like data management rather than content management project to me.

What do you think?

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Monday 03 March 2008 4:50:25 pm

Hi,

the main problem of the 500,000 records stored in the database is the content object tree table. Due it`s architecture and design it can`t deliver certain fetches very effective ( path like 'mytree/%' ). A better model has been already developed for the eZ components.

So your keys to success are:
* Only store the least necessary data in the content object related tables
* Get a cool hardware for the db, buy a lot of ram, tweak your db(maybe your model holds the demand just by doing this)
* Get technology from the components as an early adopter.

I say get a good eZ partner and build a proof of concept with them. Since your model isn`t complex proving that it would not brake shouldn`t be expensive..

For reporting I would let the reporting tool directly access the db and create it`s reports.

If one knows it better, prove me wrong :-).

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