How well does Rails handle brownfield data in a greenfield application?

Wayne Molina
2009-05-22T15:33:22Z

Let me give an example:  Say I have an e-commerce storefront with data
that''s provided by a 3rd-party vendor, instead of just a handful of
items that I''m selling myself (which seems to be the way most Rails e-
commerce sites are set up, for example Shopify).  My vendor has a list
of about 28,000 product SKUs which they provide to me as a huge tab
delimited flat-file containing product, manufacturer and category
information (i.e. not relational in any way, shape or form, just a
glorified spreadsheet), which I will need to parse several times to
extract the fields into different tables.  This file has predefined
IDs for the primary key for each column, that needs to be used in
order to reference items properly (e.g. Product #12543 is made by
Manufacturer #17835 and belongs to Category #34324, based on the
columns "ProductID", "ManufacturerID" and
"CategoryID").  I can''t
deviate from this structure.

Would Rails have any potential issues with having its ID key
predetermined beforehand?  In the database it can still be kept as an
autoincrementing integer, just the ID gets assigned prior - I''m going
to have to write a task of some kind to parse the file out into chunks
and then load the product data into the correct models using those
chunks of relevant data.  If I was dealing with a database directly
this might cause some issues, but I''m not sure about Rails itself.

I want to make sure I won''t run into any pitfalls before I make an
attempt at this.