CODEWITHSUNDEEP
magentocatalog
rsmarsha
rsmarsha

Reputation: 368

Magento flat catalog advice wanted

I'm having to convert an existing e-commerce site with 50k plus products to a magento site. Everywhere I look the advice is to use the flag catalog for this amount of products.

My question is, once enabled do new products have to be created using the old EAV tables or can I just import and update new products in the newly created flat catalog?

Thanks for any advice, I'm not looking forward to this transation at all, lol. ;)

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3729

Answers (2)

Flipmedia
Flipmedia

Reputation: 490

Think of Flat Catalog as a cache of the EAV structure. It does not replace the EAV system it simply creates a "flattened" or simplified version of the data store in EAV tables.

The EAV system is the most flexible way to store data, allowing any number of user or system variables without changes to the table structure. The down side is this system requires multiple and or recursive queries, this is slow and memory intensive. This is where the flat catalog comes in... The following is still quite accurate (even though it was written when flat catalog was first introduced) and quite clear: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/37247/#t122010

You will need to optimise memory usage within PHP and MySQL to enable rebuilding of flat catalog for a site with a large number of products.

Upvotes: 3

haltabush
haltabush

Reputation: 4528

I don't know what version of Magento your using, but until 1.4 you need to put it into the EAV structure if you have to manage your products using backoffice. The creation of the flat_ tables are automatic, it's part of the indexing process (which can be very long for this amount of products)

edit: I don't know for version after 1.4

Upvotes: 0

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