🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings, net Mac database users:

We are designing a large biographical database for our college. One of 
the tricky 'snags' is that we would like to be able to manage regular 
imports of data from the main University database to keep our database 
current. The trick is that we don't want to lose changes we may have made 
to our copy (which has additional fields and such), yet want to be able 
to do this relatively automatically, since there might be quite a few 
records that have changed for a given update. (For example, 
end-of-the-year accounting went through and information on donations 
changed for a third of our database).

The way I see this happening is that a macro or script look at each 
record of the new data and cross-check it with the existing file via a 
unique identifier (the person's ID #). For each record that matches, the 
script updates the desired fields; for each record that has no match, the 
script creates a new record and pulls in all the info.

I suppose there might be a better way of doing this, however.

I'd like to hear experiences of people that have worked on similar 
problems. Rather than focus on any single database, I'd like to hear how 
people implemented such a thing on a variety of programs.

Thanks,

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  John T. Chapman                                     jtc1@cornell.edu
  Office of Computing and Statistical Consulting
  Cornell University - College of Human Ecology
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