database

Earlier this year I was tasked with migrating a 60K contact Kintera database to CiviCRM. To make matters more "interesting", the client also had a home-grown database with mixed information, some defining new contacts and some adding information to the Kintera contacts. As it was a custom database, I won't discuss the second database merge issue any further (perhaps I just want to put it all behind me) except where needed to fill in other points.

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I like many others was completely blown away by Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. The last 3rd of the book is a compendium of non profit and non governmental organizations around the world that are working on social justice, human rights, sustainability, environmental and indigenous people's issues as well as many others. Hawken's describes these groups collectively as a movement, the largest movement in the history of the world. A movement that is decentralized and global.

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Two recent projects at CivicActions had some queries that were causing performance issues. What is interesting to note that in both cases, we found that adding a correct index to a table or two helped mitigate some of the issues.

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Have I ever told you how much I love data? After listening to Larry Garfield's talk Drupal Databases: The Next Generation, I now love data more than ever! The database layer for Drupal 7 has been completely rewritten to take advantage of PHP's PDO extenion. Not only does it allow Drupal to work with many different database types it also simplifies how developers interact with the database.

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