Web application that requires data from other databases - php

Question

I am currently helping my company to redesign the CRM.
They plan to extend the CRM to read data from another database which is used by another software.
All database are using mssql technology.
Actually, our company has three brands and each brand's data is stored in different mssql database.
Brand1:
Customer
Invoice
Payment
Brand2:
Customer
Invoice
Payment
Brand3:
Customer
Invoice
Payment
In my new database schema design. A Customer will have several invoices and each invoice receives several payments.
It is ideal to have all data to store in my newly designed db because I can extract the MOST UPDATED payments like this:
SELECT [Everything I want]
FROM Customer
INNER JOIN Invoice WHERE Invoice.customer_id=Customer.id
INNER JOIN Payment WHERE Payment.invoice_id=Invoice.id
But now I need to MAKE CONNECTION TO THREE database, getting data from them, and COMBINE the result to generate data structure like this:
{
customers:[
{
customer_name: cato,
invoices:[
{
invoice_id: 1,
payments: [bla,bla,bla]
}
]
}
]
}
Now, my company thought of using trigger but it is hard to maintain. Is there any better options that can do the job?

Answer 1

yes, sql has a great solution for this,
actually what you need is sql replication,
it gives you the ability to 'copy' tables from remote db to local, first you copy the table to your local and then you set the replication and the remote db will forward all his insert, update etc.. commands your your DB, so in fact, your local replicated table will be always syncronized with the remote one
take a look at it and follow tutorials to do the replication