Is this possible to sync customers between two seperate prestashop 1.7 shops? I dont want to use multistore option..is there a module for that or maybe some database operations?
Customers are stored in a single database table (ps_customer) , so if you are able to write a synchronization routine between the two database tables you should be able to achieve that.
There are several additional considerations though :
Both stores must have the same "cookie_key" set in the site parameters for same passwords to be validated in both shops, so you'll have to start with at least one empty store.
Customers have different relationships to databases based on their id_customer auto_increment values (addresses, orders, third party modules etc.), so you'll need to know what you're doing and make sure the two shops can't have conflicts between customer ids (IE: you can start one of the two shops with a very high id_customer..) - Also not sure if you need to handle also addresses synchronzation.. This would add some complexity.
I hope I've given you some good starting points - but I would stick with native "multishop" PS feature for that - It would be far easier despite still having a lot of bugs :)
Related
I am working at a company that merged with another company a while ago.
There we have several business units that are basically equivalent. One in Europe, one in China, each. We already had an in-house MariaDB database, which we want to start sharing.
The problem is that there are different GDPR regulations and contracts that prohibit sharing certain data across sites. So what I can't do, is replicate data across sites and then just hide in from the user in the frontend. The private data has to stay at the facility, it belongs to.
So my idea was to separate each table that we have now and where possibly sensitive information is contained into two tables each.
One say table_contracts_private and table_contracts_public.
This would still seem pretty doable with basic database replication and replicating the public tables across sites. But how would you go about publishing private data? Also how would I best combine private and public data? Just using a view
I just could not find any good mechanisms for this, especially because we would also like to avoid data duplication, so the private entries would need to be removed and replaced by the public ones, which would entail also changing all referencing IDs.
Is this a possible application of sharding?
I'd be really grateful, if someone could point me in the right direction, or if someone has a demo project with similar requirements that I could check out.
Cheers
Is this a possible application of sharding?
I wouldn't think so. Sharding is a performance optimization method. What you need is to support legal constraints. Those are two very different problems.
I think you are on the right track. I call this a "walled garden" approach. You create a database with all non-PII information, using ids only. Nothing that remotely directly identifies people, their addresses, phones, credit cards, and so on. This can be tricky. In some jurisdictions combinations of demographics can be PII.
Some of those ids then refer to another database where you store all the sensitive information; this is the "walled garden". I would recommend that this second database be on a separate server. It has a very restricted access list. And this is where you implement requirements for things like "forgetting" a customer.
In any case, the point is that sharding is not the right approach. You want an application redesign with privacy and security as the top priorities. Happily, this is not actually that hard to implement, although if the databases are changing, you may need period auditing. For instance, in one database I worked with, we discovered that "coupon codes" sometimes contained unencrypted email addresses. Arrgggh!
We have an old repair database that has alot of relational tables and it works as it should but i need to update it to be able to handle different clients ( areas ) - currenty this is done as a single client only.
So i need to extend the tables and the sql statements so ex i can login as user A and he will see his own system only and user B will have his own system too.
Is it correctly understood that you wouldnt create new tables for each client but just add a clientID to every record in every ( base ) table and then just filter with a clientid in all sql statements to be able to achieve multiple clients ?
Is this also something that would work ( how is it done ) on hosted solutions ? Am worried about performance if thats an issue lets say i had 500 clients ( i wont but from a theoretic viewpoint ) ?
The normal situation is to add a client key to each table where appropriate. Many tables don't need them -- such as reference tables.
This is preferred for many reasons:
You have the data for all clients in one place, so you can readily answers a question such as "what is the average X for each client".
If you change the data structure, then it affects all clients at the same time.
Your backup and restore strategy is only implemented once.
Your optimization is only implemented once.
This is not always the best solution. You might have requirements that specify that data must be separated -- in which case, each client should be in a separate database. However, indexes on the additional keys are probably a minor consideration and you shouldn't worry about it.
This question has been asked before. The problem with adding the key to every table is that you say you have a working system, and this means every query needs to be updated.
Probably the easiest is to create a new database for each client, so that the only thing you need to change is the connection string. This also means you can get automated query tools for example to work without worrying about cross-client data leakage.
And it also allows you to backup, transfer, delete a single client easily as well.
There are of course pros and cons to this approach, but it will simplify the development effort. Also remember that if you plan to spin it up in a cloud environment then spinning up databases like this is also very easy.
I am new to microservices and have been struggling to wrap my brain around it. On the surface they sound like a good idea, but from a practical standpoint, I can't break away from my centralized database background. For an example, I have this real-world Marketplace example that I cannot figure out if microservices would help or hurt. This site was working well until the PO asked for "Private Products." Now it is fragile and slow so I need to do a major refactor. A good time to implement microservices. I feel like many systems have this type of coupling, so that deconstructing this example would be very instructive.
Current State
This is a b2b marketplace where users belong to companies that are buying products from each other. Currently, there exists a monolithic database: User, Company, Catalog, Product, and Order. (This is a simplification, the actual scenario is much more complicated, users have roles, orders have header/detail, products have inventories, etc.)
Users belong to Companies
Companies have a Catalog of their Products
Companies have Orders for Products from other Companies
So far so good. I could see breaking the app into microservices on the major entity boundaries.
New Requirement
Unfortunately for my architectural aspirations, the product owner wants more features. In this case: Private Products.
Products are Public or Private
Companies send time-bound Invitations to Products or Catalogs to Users of other Companies
This seemingly simple request all the suddenly complicated everything.
Use Case - User displays a list of products
For example, listing or searching products was once just a simple case of asking the Products to list/search themselves. It is one of the top run queries on the system. Unfortunately, now what was a simple use case just got messy.
A User should be able to see all public Products (easy)
A User should be able to see all their own Company's private Products (not horrible)
A User can see any Product that their Company has Ordered in the past regardless of privacy (Uh oh, now the product needs to know about the User Company's Order history)
A User can see any private Product for which they have an active Invitation (Uh oh, now the product needs to know about the User's Product or Catalog Invitations which are time dependent)
Initial Monolithic Approach
This can be solved at the database level, but the SQL joins basically ALL of the tables together (and not just master data tables, all the transactions as well.) While it is a lot slower than before, since a DBMS is designed for big joins it seems like the appropriate tool. So I can start working on optimizing the query. However, as I said, for this and other reasons the system is feeling fragile.
Initial Design Thoughts... and ultimately my questions
So considering a Microservices architecture as a potential new direction, I began to think about how to start. Data redundancy seems necessary. Since, if I translate my major entities into services, asking to get a list of products without data redundancy would just have all of the services calling each other and a big slow mess.
Starting with a the idea of carving out "Product and Catalog" as its own microservice. Since Catalogs are just collections of Products, they seem to belong together - I'll just call the whole thing the "Product Service". This service would have an API for managing both products and catalogs and, most importantly, to search and list them.
As a separate service, to perform a Product search would require a lot of redundant data as it would have to subscribe to any event that affected product privacy, such as:
Listen for Orders and keep at least a summary of the relationship between purchased Products and Purchasing Companies
Listen to Invitations and maintain a list of active User/Product/Time relationships
Listen to User and Company events to maintain a User to Company relationship
I begin to worry about keeping it all synchronized.
In the end, a Product Service would have a large part of the current schema replicated. So I begin to think, maybe Microservices won't work for this situation. Or am I being melodramatic and the schema will be simpler enough to be more managable and faster so it is worth it?
Overall, am I thinking about this whole approach properly? Is this how microservice based designs are intended to be thought through? If not, can somebody give me a push in a different direction?
Try splitting your system into services over and over until it makes sense. Use your gut feeling. Read more books, articles, forums where other people describing how they did it.
You've mentioned that there is no point of splitting ProductService into Product and ProductSearch - fair enough, try to implement it like that. If you will end up with a pretty complicated schema for some reason or with performance bottlenecks - it's a good sign to continue splitting further. If not - it is fine like that for your specific domain.
Not all product services made equal. In some situations, you have to be able to create millions or even billions of products per day. In this situation, it is most likely that you should consider separating product catalogue and product search. The reason is performance: to make search perform faster (indexing) you have to slow down inserts. These are two mutually exclusive goals that are hard to reach without separating data into different microservices (which will lead to data duplication as well).
Im working on a db to manage customer data for a small company.The customers are companies and institutions (schools..etc) and of course people/contacts. There will be a lot more scope added in time, but right now I'm looking for any input on the core design itself and if there's anything I'm missing here that could cause issues down the road. The image doesn't include the additional lookup tables for items like; country, teltype..etc. I'm kinda worried that I've over-normalised it and it is going to make the queries much more complicated in the long-term. Any input appreciated.
Update - 13/12/2016
I have since created a superclass in my structure called entity, which helps me merge all 3 into one as such. I'm still working on the rest as it has grown quite a lot today, so again any input is appreciated.
The first impression I get looking at the diagram is that you have over-normalised the data (unless that was your aim).
Consider the Company <-> Telephone relationship you have created:-
Creating a relationship like this reads:
A Company can have one to many Telephone Numbers
A Telephone Number can belong to one to many Companies
Evaluating this for a minute; is it likely that a telephone number is shared by more than one Company in your structure? (real-world suggests it wouldn't)
Expanding upon this, I believe the main reason you may have headed down this course would be to allow the same telephone number to apply to one or many contacts as well as a business?
Personally, in my experience, I would suggest a duplication of data (telephone number) maybe easier to maintain and manage from a development perspective. This will make you data structure and application logic less complex, and should make searching less taxing on the system.
However, it will also mean you could end up with stale data, for example, if all of your contacts used the company phone number and the company number was updated, all of the contacts data would now need updating too.
One way round that from an application perspective would be to display the company number with a company contact, then you would not need to duplicate data.
Here is an example of a de-normalised view of this relationship:
You could also apply this to email addresses, where the same concept applies.
Do you need to have bridge tables for telephone, email, and location? If there is no need to have multiple sites, e-mails, or telephone numbers; you can add the attributes to the primary entity.
We're building a Silverlight application which will be offered as SaaS. The end product is a Silverlight client that connects to a WCF service. As the number of clients is potentially large, updating needs to be easy, preferably so that all instances can be updated in one go.
Not having implemented multi tenancy before, I'm looking for opinions on how to achieve
Easy upgrades
Data security
Scalability
Three different models to consider are listed on msdn
Separate databases. This is not easy to maintain as all schema changes will have to be applied to each customer's database individually. Are there other drawbacks? A pro is data separation and security. This also allows for slight modifications per customer (which might be more hassle than it's worth!)
Shared Database, Separate Schemas. A TenantID column is added to each table. Ensuring that each customer gets the correct data is potentially dangerous. Easy to maintain and scales well (?).
Shared Database, Separate Schemas. Similar to the first model, but each customer has its own set of tables in the database. Hard to restore backups for a single customer. Maintainability otherwise similar to model 1 (?).
Any recommendations on articles on the subject? Has anybody explored something similar with a Silverlight SaaS app? What do I need to consider on the client side?
Depends on the type of application and scale of data. Each one has downfalls.
1a) Separate databases + single instance of WCF/client. Keeping everything in sync will be a challenge. How do you upgrade X number of DB servers at the same time, what if one fails and is now out of sync and not compatible with the client/WCF layer?
1b) "Silos", separate DB/WCF/Client for each customer. You don't have the sync issue but you do have the overhead of managing many different instances of each layer. Also you will have to look at SQL licensing, I can't remember if separate instances of SQL are licensed separately ($$$). Even if you can install as many instances as you want, the overhead of multiple instances will not be trivial after a certain point.
3) Basically same issues as 1a/b except for licensing.
2) Best upgrade/management scenario. You are right that maintaining data isolation is a huge concern (1a technically shares this issue at a higher level). The other issue is if your application is data intensive you have to worry about data scalability. For example if every customer is expected to have tens/hundreds millions rows of data. Then you will start to run into issues and query performance for individual customers due to total customer base volumes. Clients are more forgiving for slowdowns caused by their own data volume. Being told its slow because the other 99 clients data is large is generally a no-go.
Unless you know for a fact you will be dealing with huge data volumes from the start I would probably go with #2 for now, and begin looking at clustering or moving to 1a/b setup if needed in the future.
We also have a SaaS product and we use solution #2 (Shared DB/Shared Schema with TenandId). Some things to consider for Share DB / Same schema for all:
As mention above, high volume of data for one tenant may affect performance of the other tenants if you're not careful; for starters index your tables properly/carefully and never ever do queries that force a table scan. Monitor query performance and at least plan/design to be able to partition your DB later on based some criteria that makes sense for your domain.
Data separation is very very important, you don't want to end up showing a piece of data to some tenant that belongs to other tenant. every query must have a WHERE TenandId = ... in it and you should be able to verify/enforce this during dev.
Extensibility of the schema is something that solutions 1 and 3 may give you, but you can go around it by designing a way to extend the fields that are associated with the documents/tables in your domain that make sense (ie. Metadata for tables as the msdn article mentions)
What about solutions that provide an out of the box architecture like Apprenda's SaaSGrid? They let you make database decisions at deploy and maintenance time and not at design time. It seems they actively transform and manage the data layer, as well as provide an upgrade engine.
I've similar case, but my solution is take both advantage.
Where data and how data being placed is the question from tenant. Being a tenant of course I don't want my data to be shared, I want my data isolated, secure and I can get at anytime I want.
Certain data it possibly share eg: company list. So database should be global and tenant database, just make sure to locked in operation tenant database schema, and procedure to update all tenant database at once.
Anyway SaaS model everything delivered as server / web service, so no matter where the database should come to client as service, then only render by client GUI.
Thanks
Existing answers are good. You should look deeply into the issue of upgrading and managing multiple databases. Without knowing the specific app, it might turn out easier to have multiple databases and not have to pay the extra cost of tracking the TenantID. This might not end up being the right decision, but you should certainly be wary of the dev cost of data sharing.