If in the previous chapter we kept things a bit more theoretical with me throwing "rules" at you, but in this chapter I am going to make up for it, and we are going to have some fun. This means we are going to write some code that demonstrates concepts related to data processing, especially larger amounts of it. And in doing so, we are going to cover a few topics.
First, we are going to look back at the hook_update_N() hook we saw in Chapter 8, The Database API, when we talked about the Database API. More specifically, we are going to see how the &$sandbox parameter can be used in order to handle updates that need to process some data, which may take a bit longer and should be split across multiple requests. Next up, we are going to look at standalone batches (which basically use the same system) to process data in batches across multiple...
