MySQL

Although there is a sql ansi standard each database vendor has its own proprietary extensions and MySQL is no different. These changes, although small, are frustrating enough to cost hours of lost time and productivity. One of the issues I lost some time on was how to do an "if exists ... then ...else" statement in a stored procedure, basically to have some dynamic sql execute an update or an insert query depending on whether the record already existed or not.

We recently had to import some masterfile information from Pastel into vTiger for a client. Since a lot of SA companies use Pastel I thought I would write "how to" to help others to use vTiger and get a state of the art, open source, CRM system up and running.

This "how to" assumes a clean vTiger database i.e. a fresh vTiger install. It would not be hard to get the scripts to workwith a database that already has data. The scripts would need to be adjusted for the next crmentity sequence number.

Here is a simple backup script that we use to backup MySQL servers where there are a large number of databases. Each database is dumped out to separate file making restoration for individual databases much easier. Usually scripts dump all databases out into one large file. This is problematic if there are many databases and some of them are large. Simple copy the script into /etc/cron.daily to have it executed each day.