General purpose e-commerce solution

The schema design within ATG is poor. It does not follow accepted standards. For example, column naming is inconsistent and generalized, with multiple (unrelated) tables using column names like "ID" as primary/foreign keys. This is a barrier to an intuitive understanding of the schema. Out of the box, the schema is missing many important foreign key relationships. In fact, the publishing schema explicitly prohibits FK relationships, causing data inconsistencies when ATG's black-box algorithms fail. We've built an impressive arsenal of custom scripts specifically for handling the many exceptions and orphan conditions that arise from this design practice.

The job scheduler is poorly designed. It uses a database table to manage message queueing. The processes flows as follows: Messages are inserted into a table. Then, a scheduled process selects messages, applies them, updates the message row on success/failure, then goes back and looks for messages that are "complete" in order to delete them. It performs this in a serialized loop that is inefficient and heavy on database resources. There are far better ways for processing message queues than trying to leverage a database.