[TYPO3] Dealing with 2.5 million commerce items...

[Daniel Smedegaard Buus]

Hey :)

I'm just about ready to start implementing this big ecommerce site. I've
followed the tutorials, read up on typoscript etc., and I figure now is
about time to get some dirt under my fingernails.

My first concern here is this: The system needs to manage at present more
than two and a half million sellable items in the database. This figure
*will* grow over time - the database is constantly expanded via feeds from
external providers.

I'd like to use the all the generic data handling capabilities of TYPO3, but
at the same time I can't really see how it would ever be practically
possible (or practical anyway) to have the items presented in the tree
structure, as seems to be the "kosher" way to do it (even Commerce does
this). I would pretty much like to have like a sysfolder called "Goods" or
something which would give access to the items in the database through
searching, browsing, and such. It'd be cool to still be able to click
the "Goods" sysfolder's icon, then "New" and get a native TYPO3 editor to
add items (as well as I'd like to be able to use as much similar built-in
functionality for all aspects of the data management). But once I'd save
it, it wouldn't appear in the tree, it'd only be reachable by searching, so
as to limit the impact on the backend, SQL server, and browser.

Are there any extensions doing something like this that I could look at for
inspiration? Is it possible? Difficult to do? A bad approach?

I'm still very "searching" in my approach to problem-solving with TYPO3, as
the tutorials are my only practical experience as of now. I'd like to stay
as "true" to the TYPO3 "rules" in implementing this so that I benefit as
much as possible from the built-in functionality and compatibility with
other existing extensions.

Am I making sense here?

Thanks in advance for any input,
Daniel :)