Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition

CHAPTER 38 Importing and Exporting Data

Back in the Stone Age, cavemen never really had any issues with data incompatibility, as stones and one's own memory were the only storage medium. Copying data involved pulling out the old chisel and getting busy on a new slab of granite. Now, of course, the situation is much different. Hundreds of data storage strategies exist, the most commonplace of which include spreadsheets and various types of databases. Working in a complex, often convoluted fashion, you often need to convert data from one storage type to another, say between a spreadsheet and a relational database, or between an Oracle database and MySQL. If this is done poorly, you could spend hours, and even days and weeks, massaging the converted ...