Re: [Beankeeper-discussion] Safe to externally modify database?

[Brautigam R. <de...@ne...>]

ihammerhands2000 wrote:
> Hi, I am a new user to this great framework, but I do have one question 
> before I fully adopt this: Is it safe to externally modify the data?

Hi,

The meta-data added by BeanKeeper is very important for data integrity 
reasons. Therefore it is not safe to modify the data externally. You can 
read the data without issues if you want to, but if you modify the data 
from external source, it may cause an inconsistent state for running 
BeanKeeper nodes.

> Reading over the docs (specifically 
> http://beankeeper.netmind.hu/doc/beankeeper_3.html#SEC20) it says that 
> seperate persistence_* tables are created and in each table there is a 
> persistence_id column for some sort of tracking. This leads me to 
> believe that if I use this product, I will be locked into it because of 
> all the management of the database.

Every table has meta-data in it additionally to the normal data of your 
classes/objects. I wouldn't say you become locked to BeanKeeper, because 
the library itself tries to create as readable databases as possible. It 
means, if you later want to move away from BeanKeeper, the migration 
should be as easy as removing historical records and dropping the 
meta-data columns, so nothing fancy.

> So, can this be modified outside of this Java library safely (I'm going 
> to be using php for the webpage frontend)?

Unfortunately I don't think that would work. Although if you want to use 
PHP instead of Java, maybe you can create some kind of binding to use 
BeanKeeper anyway.. I don't know enough PHP to know whether that's 
possible or not.

Unfortunately I feel you would be better off with a native PHP ORM library.

> Thanks

Robert.