Creating an API to communicate directly with Magento DB

Question

We have been using the Magento Rest API to communicate between external systems and Magento. Painfully, we have discovered that the REST API does not scale well. Specifically, often times requests time-out when requesting large amounts of data (say, about fifty products). We are using version 1.7.0.2.

One solution we are investigating is creating a custom API not written using Magento for the purpose of reading/writing into Magento.

• Is this a solution typically used?
• If so, any packages that simplify read/write operations from Magento EAV tables?
• If not, are there any ways to speed up the Magento REST API?

We are in the process of scaling and speed is very important to us.

Answer 1

I'm not a fan of connecting to the a database at all. If someone gets hold of the credentials, because your code has a security leak or anything, anyone could read all data in the database, including customer data and creditcard data (if you save that). That's something you really don't want.

Did you look at extensions like uRapidflow or AvS_FastSimpleImport, which are Magento extensions that work really fast for importing data into Magento. The only thing you might have to do is write a custom layer which will fetch (or write) the data to the Magento server and make it usable for one of these extensions.

I know it's a completely different approach, but I think it's a much safer and more useful approach then connection directly to the database.

Answer 2

This solution can be used.
Make additional api and write your queries there, you can use same db adapter or write your own queries, you just need to be precise when writing the query and insure that you are only reading and publishing the data needed.
Internally magento also generating queries and executing on database to populate the result. This will give you some better performance and less timeout errors.
But make queries wisely.