We're in the process of moving our site into the DxC environment hosted by Episerver, however we're not allowed to host any of our custom databases alongside our Episerver CMS database. Would be curious to hear what solutions anyone else here has used to overcome this limitation.
Options:
- Custom tables - this provides the closest proximity to the Episerver CMS database and reduces latency, however we would need to create an entire CRUD process to keep this data in sync with actual database it comes from. Using custom replication software (as we do now) isn't allowed on the DxC either. I've the documentation around Fluent Migrator and using Initialization Modules, or EF Code First Migrations, however those seem to only assist with the schema aspect of the data. Also, I don't believe Episerver would allow our stored procedures to be placed in the same database as these custom tables (but not totally sure there.)
Ref: https://world.episerver.com/digital-experience-cloud-service/development-considerations/custom-database-tables/ - Azure Database - we could spin up our own Azure instance and upload our custom databases there. Obviously there are some additional expenses here, but our bigger concern in this scenario is that the network latency could become an issue as we cannot place these custom databases in the same instance that our Episerver CMS database lives in.
- API Rewrite - instead of using a database at all, we could all an API to retrieve the data directly and store it, then update the data at some reasonable interval. Of course, the effort of writing all of this isn't a small task, and we'd also need to run the numbers to ensure we don't get too close to our data provider's service limits with all the API calls.
- Don't use the DxC - continue with our hosted version of Episerver on a VM and connecting to our database servers in that same VM cluster, hoping Episerver eventually finds a better option for custom databases in their DxC. Of course, here we lose out on all the features of the DxC, which is less than preferable as well.
Anything else we should be considering?