Hello,
I've been asked to complete an email append in the very near future for our organization, TPS. We're the master license holder of a new consortium and are working through several projects in preparation for the first consortium merge - there are potentially 52K duplicate accounts currently. Additionally, our email addresses have not yet been moved off the General Tab. Tessitura will be contracted to assist with the pre-merge tasks and the consortium merge but not before this email append is due. As a result, there's the possibility that some of the append emails may be for patrons who have accounts not only with our organization but one or both of the other consortium members. What are my options for the email append (SQL scripts, utilities, etc.) and what might be the best strategy given the challenges of the consortium and many duplicate accounts? Would it make sense to create a new eaddress type for these append emails and use a SQL script to add them to the T_EADDRESS table? Is there a utility that would work better in this situation? I appreciate any suggestions you might have.
Thank you,
Shereen
Shereen,
I think the idea of putting the emails in their own type during the append has a lot of merit. It is fairly easy to change the type later. Much easier than trying to untangle things later. The other thing I often do with large data adds from an outside source is to script the "created_by" field to something distinct (like "eapp1013"). This will allow you to round up all of those emails later if you need to identify them.
I don't know of any utilities that make this easier. But I do have a couple of scripts that I've used in the past. You would need to look through them and customize them, But the biggest advantage is that I've built a WHILE loop that helps you grab the right values from T_NEXT_ID as the inserts are being done.
Thank you, Levi. I appreciate your suggestion to insert a flag into the 'create_by' field. I've done this with other inserts but I'd not thought to add it here so thanks for pointing it out. Yes, I think a SQL script will be more efficient than any of the utilities. I have a working script but I'd like to see your solution with the WHILE loop. Feel free to contact me directly at smarino@phoenixsymphony.org.
Thanks again,