Trying to implement DNN with a legacy database we found a few problems.
First DNN is designed to support multiple portals with only one web application /SQL server instance (great feature).
Unfortunately our legacy database is designed in such a way that only one server instance per client is allowed (a school is a client in our case).
Is there a way to associate (link) each portal on DNN to pull data from different external instance of our legacy database. We would like to host max 10-15 portals on one instance of DNN. (Which would make 1 DNN database and 10-15 school?s databases on the same server)?
In other words can we force each portal to pull its data from an external database instead of DNN own database?
Second and not a critical problem is that we already designed few .NET assemblies as persistence and business layer frameworks and wonder if we can use this framework instead of BLL/DAL layers of DNN.
I would like to ask more experienced DNN developers, if such type of hosting is possible and if there is a better approach to solve problems likes this.