CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

By the usual process of small charity crisis management, our ailing Access 2 membership database is in the process of being replaced with a shiny online MySQL database and a JQuery/PHP web front end, allowing both our administrator and members the ability to update and edit details online. My medium-term plan for about a year has been to migrate to CiviCRM in order to bring far greater functionality to our organisation, a small charity & NFP supporting directors in film, tv and theatre in the UK (http://www.dggb.org).

Our friendly and long-suffering database expert has had a quick look at Civi (w. Drupal) and is worried that importing the database over to Civi will lose much of the existing functionality because of the way Drupal handles data; i.e. the user is viewing a page rather than, as at the moment, a database form, and the rather clever versioning that's built in now will be lost (every instance of a change to the data is saved and viewable).

So - without the technical knowledge to read the "Big Book of Civi" (sorry, I'm an analyst pure and simple and my programming ability is limited to "printscreen DLROW OLLEH") - is this: Is it possible to link Civi CRM data requirements directly to our external SQL database, or must it always use its own proprietary dataset? And if the latter is the case, is there a way to link the two datasets (not ideal but a possible solution)?

I'd be enormously grateful for input from anyone who feels they can help out with an answer to this; we are not a "cash-rich" charity and help would be enormously appreciated - especially from someone who might consider doing a "Move to Civi" evaluation.

Ivor Benjamin
Chair/Trustee
DGGB/Directors Guild Trust

Thanks, Donald - yes, I did know CiviCRM created its own SQL db - by proprietary I meant specific to.

I think linking is probably the way we would go with the membership data so as to retain use of other functionalities; can you please point me at any documentation for how to do that?

And do you think it would it work to link to the membership data externally and allow CiviCRM to use it's own db for things like events, payments, etc.?

Sadly, at the moment we don't have enough money to send our db expert on a course - nor do I think he would have the time to build a full Civi implementation for us. 

Regards,

Ivor B.

Sounds like Civi would be a perfect fit for you if you just imported your data into it and used it. The only feature that you mention that isn't currently in Civi is the versioning but that is in the works and should be implemented in the next few versions.

I'd stick around and keep watch on it...or maybe even go ahead and install a "testing system" where you could play around with it and learn it's features so by the time the versioning is implemented you'd be ready to go with a live install.

Ivor,

Take a look at  http://civicrm.org/blogs/shot/upcoming-feature-logging   It explains it better than I ever could.

I think it will do what you are wanting.