AEM 6.3 database Interaction (pros and cons)

[mohanganesh]

with the AEM 6.3 it looks like now we seem to have a capability wherein using Java/OSGi we can connect to databases such as Oracle/mySql and get the data to AEM environment, which is nice feature.

my questions are

does this adds any overhead to AEM runtime environment in terms of if it reads the data from JCR repo vs external data source such as Oracle?

would it have any negative impact in terms of performance of the AEM services?

does cache of the request dispatcher would be still intact for these kinds of services consumed through AEM.

I was just looking for others pros and cons before head down on this pattern.

[smacdonald2008 · Accepted solution]

AEM has always had the capability to connect to a relational database. This is not a new feature. Will a service that interacts with a relational database impact performance? Like any data related question - this all depends on the size of the result set. If you want the service to work with a very large data set - it may impact performance. If you want to perform SQL updates, etc, then it should not really impact performance. All depends on the size of the data set.

Read this white paper -- https://helpx.adobe.com/content/dam/help/attachments/JCR_DB.pdf

[mohanganesh]

@smcdonald2008 thanks for the document; I did not read the entire document in details but section 7 did help me in deciding when to use AEM  JCR versus RDBMS for transactions.  based on the nature of the app content based vs content +trasnaction based will help folks to make the right decision.