External database connected to Revit

[davidWV85W]

Hi

I'm evaluating an approach to handle large amounts of object metadata.
The main use is attribute data of objects as metadata.

Somehow we need to handle this externally initially (or in parallell) to the main Revit database.
We need to be able to both read and write (Revit, excel etc.)

Initially we looked at MS Access but I fear it's not robust enough for a complex situation as this. in the end it's likely millions of entries of metadata that I need structured in a certain way (tree of systems in a naming convention)

[jeremy_tammik]

Yes, it makes a lot of sense to keep certain data in an external database, both to lessen the load on Revit and to make it accessible to other systems.

One such roundtrip connection with Excel for a single trivial data item is demonstrated by the FireRating SDK sample:

• Exporting Parameter Data to Excel, and Re-importing
• FireRating and the Revit Python Shell in the Cloud

It uses the element id to store data for one single Revit document. I implemented the FireRatingCloud sample to demonstrate how this can be scaled up to support the millions of data items you describe by using the Revit element unique id and the cloud-based NoSQL MongoDb database storage instead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL

https://github.com/jeremytammik/FireRatingCloud