Incorporating external database into PW site

[hellomoto]

I was thinking to utilize URL segments for pages via external API, however I don't know how those would be indexed by search engines reliably/conveniently? I'm guessing a script could be written to ask for them to be crawled? but I'm not sure whether that's worth it.

Does anyone here do this? for fairly complex articles of data? I think I've seen on here before people mentioning synchronizing real estate databases, for example, to native PW and/or vice-versa... That would be the way to go, then? to enable PW-independence?

Otherwise maybe have a module for managing the external database (like crud) within the PW admin and integrating the API, where for each external record, a page exists (is created/deleted/unpublished accordingly) with its name = id in db. With just the corresponding ID to the record, probably views and SEO at least could be dynamically generated...

Any drawbacks or concerns that come to mind

[d'Hinnisdaël]

What are you using ProcessWire for in this scenario? Will you have other internal content managed in ProcessWire or will you just be using it to render the external content on the frontend?

I've done the latter before (using PW only to import and display data) und wouldn't recommend doing it. Importing the data is just a lot of added complexity. A static site generator might be a better solution here.