CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

You may want to read about our explorations of using the Migrate module here - http://fuzion.co.nz/content/migrate-2-civicrm-api-3-civimigrate

It has worked well for us in pulling in large and complex legacy systems HTH

Hi,

It will obviously run faster if you stay as close as possible to the metal and you go directly into the db. This being said, the api overhead is there to hide the complexity of the sql schema and will likely avoid a lot of problems of corrupted and incoherent data. I'd recommend using the API, 300k isn't that much.

We have identified a few apis (email and phone for instance if I recall) that that are overly protective and do an extra read to verify that the type is valid. This additional lookup is costly when you do it for each. On that topic, try to use ids for these type of fields (status, role, type...) to avoid an extra query (often), and do the mapping manually ones at the start.

I would suggest you to ping us on IRC and help fixing them, the time you spend improving the API will save a lot of time.

It's probably not worthwhile chaining the api in php code, write separate calls, allows a finer error handling.

I personally prefer stating away of any UI for my imports, because having to clicks around is way slower i feels than having everything in code. Last but not the least, have a look at api/class.api.php it offers the same feature but with a different syntax that I grew found of recently.

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