> Can you (or others) tell us more about the details of loading user
> information from a remote system in batch?
> ...
> How are you doing this at Galileo?

Right now we just configured our AOLServer to connect to two databases. The GES database and the University's database - we're lucky that both run Oracle. We have a scheduled tcl procedure that digs in both databases, figures out what changed and updates the GES database accordingly.

We've also built a lot of administrative pages that let you figure out if a particular user is out of sync. Check what happened during the last sync, etc. There's one particularly useful page that lets you merge two users. The cool thing about this page is that, unlike the original merge page which would break whenever a module added a FK to the users table, it looks at the metadata that Oracle stores and figures out from which tables it has to move/delete info in order to merge the users. So even if other programmers add tables and modules that use the users table the merge page still works. I can give you the source code if you want it... altough it only works in Oracle... I don't know enough PostgreSQL to know if it's even possible there...

> Is this what's needed? (* Referring to IMS *)

I don't know! I'll read the standard and come back with more comments.

Regards,

-Oscar