My client has an offline product database for a high street shop that they update fairly frequently for their own purposes. They are now creating an online store which they want to use product information from this database.
Migrating the database to a hosted server and abandoning the offline database is not an option due to their current legacy software set up.
So my question is: how can I get the information from their offline database to an online database? Their local server is always connected to the internet so is it possible to create a script on the website that somehow grabs the data from their server and imports it into the online server? If this ran every 24 hours it would be perfect. But is it even possible? And if so how would I do it?
The only other option I can think of is to manually upload the database after every update, but this isn’t really a viable idea.
I did something like this with quickbooks using an odbc connection. Using that I synced data to MySQL. This synchronization however, was just one way. Unless you have keys in the data that indicates when something was changed (updated date), you will end up syncing alot of extra data.
Using SQLYog, i set up a scheduled job that connected to the odbc data source, and pushed the changes since last sync to the mysql database I was using to generate reports. If you can get the data replicated into MySQL it should be easy at that point to make use of it in your online store.
The downside is that it wont be realtime. Inventory could become a problem.