Over the last couple of months, Salescast has been made much simpler by supporting data import from flat text files. This option has been improved and simplified further through the introduction of BigFiles, our cloud-based file hosting solution.

Based on the feedback we received from many companies, the flat file approach proved to be superior to the SQL option in about every way:

  • It’s vastly faster, we routinely observe 100x speed-ups.
  • It’s easier to setup, to debug and to maintain.
  • It’s more secure, Lokad not requiring any remote access.

We could have maintained the SQL support indefinitely until we realized that we were doing a disservice to our clients: by supporting an inferior option, we frequently faced situations where our clients started with SQL, failed along the way (frequently for performance issues), to finally succeed through the flat file approach.

In contrary, failing with files to succeed with SQL was never observed.

Thus, we have decided to phase out the SQL support of Salescast. Support of SQL import/export will end on December 31st 2013.

Over the last couple of months, we have already transitioned most our customer base from SQL toward flat files. We will keep working with all the remaining impacted clients to make the transition as smooth as possible.

In particular, it must be noted that the flat file format of Salescast is quasi-equivalent to raw dump of the SQL tables as expected by Salescast; hence, the effort to transition from SQL to flat files is typically minimal.

If you have any question about this transition, don’t hesitate to contact us.