Hi,

I have a situation where I have to important customer information from multiple ticketing agencies for the theatre company I work for and I have a couple of questions about importing that I hope you can answer for me.

Firstly, I get a report from an agency which includes their UID for the customer. That is different to the UID I have for the customer. I don't want to overwrite that customer data every time I do an import and I don't want to append the data or I will end up with duplicate records for each customer. Is there a way I can upload only new records?

1. Would this be by making the attribute with the agency's UID in it indexed and not allowing duplicates?

2. would this be best managed by having an import table which is rewritten every time and then a series of queries that contain a criteria that excludes records if the AgencyUID in my main customer table does not equal the UID of the imported data, and  then appends the result of that to my main customer table?

Second issue, as I mentioned earlier my theatre company deals with multiple ticketing agencies because we do a lot of touring. This means at the end of the year I could end up with 8 John Smiths being imported if John Smith had attended a show in each of the 8 different venues. This is annoying. I would like to have a single view of the customer so that I can create queries and reports that show that customer's overall purchasing behaviour. How would you solve this situation? Would you have each agencyUID in the main customer table? Would you have a many to many table situation set up? Then on the importing data front, I think the issue is the same the one above, how would i not create multiple records for the same customer? Would the process of relating an existing customer to a new agency UID need to be a manual process the first time that agency UID is uploaded?

Thanks, Mike

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Reply from Richard Rost:

Michael, your first question will be answered in Expert 22 where I cover importing price changes from vendors. You would basically keep the vendor's ProductID in your database in addition to your own. This way your database knows which products already exist - and just to update the pricing, rather than import the entire record.

You would need some sort of unique way to identify each John Smith - a phone number or email address, perhaps. Once you have that, you could certainly set up a unique record for him in a customer table, and then many-to-many relate him to an agency table.