On 7/20/06, Mark Stanton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yeah, I've spent lots of years doing it too. Which is why I'm surprised I haven't built anything to automate the process yet.
An associate (and heavy-duty consultant for Accenture) like to quote "There are 23 problems in computer science, and we keep solving them over, and over and over."
For example, ZenCart accepts logins, and phpBB does too. And there's what looks like half a process in ZenCart to catch logins from phpBB data tables and import the information. I've not looked at it in detail yet.
I think there is a Fallacy of Generalization here: "all database work involves People, Places, Things and Events. If we can just create the perfect model of these four, then we will have solved all computer problems."
Initial import is relatively easy. Relative to keeping both datasets in synch. Now any particular transfer isn't too terribly hard. But what I want is a generalised updating system that has templates & rules for each end of an updating process and for it to chunk away in the background keeping the data in synch.
And how do you handle conflicts? Failures to update? Connectivity errors? At the high end, MQ Series and MSMQ queue changes from source to target, retry after failures, report conflicts, etc. MS Data Transformation Services provides a programmatic interface to reading, transforming and posting data, with lots of hooks for you to write manipulations and reporting along the way.
That's why the question was rather general. Because I'm trying to generalise the problem and come up with a way to produce and automate answers to it.
And I'd respectfully suggest a generaized solution is difficult, complex and expensive. There are lots of cheaper solutions to specific cases, and moderatly-priced solutions to others. As I've said, master-slave synchronization (really more of roll-up into read-only warehouse) can be accomplished with floppy disks and postal mailers. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
