Could somebody please give me a high level overview of the steps for performing an NCOA "update" on our Tess database?
Are there any resources or documentation I could use?
Thanks, Mark
At Cal Performances we've contracted out actually running our customer accounts against the NCOA databases to a third party. The organze our data, look for matches, then return separate CSVs (actually we now request tab-delimited text, it works better with BCP) for changes and deletions.
I've built three stored procedures around this. The first imports the data from the flat files using BCP commands and "format files". It also organizes and cleans the data a little bit and puts it in a "staging" table.
Then I have a second stored procedure which runs through the staging tables and tries to apply the changes or deletions to the customer accounts, marking the staging table as it goes.
Although the data we get is extremely reliable, we do call out a number of situations where we defer changing the data until it can be manually processed. People with high level constituencies (major donors, board members, etc.) are flagged but not changed, as are inactive accounts and merged accounts. Also, we flag any address that has been updated since the NCOA data was run.
The third procedure returns formatted data to a report which can be run by the development and box offices staff assigned to "VIP" and inactive/merged/recently updated NCOA updates respectively.
Not surprisingly, our first run of this system created all sorts of problems due to the size and scope of the changes (for instance, I was running each script within a transaction in SQL, which generated huge overhead and nearly caused our database to fill its drive space), but the runs we've done since have been far more managable.