Foreign Perspectives

One of the perennial problems that you have when trying to use information from someone else’s database is that they never code the information in quite the same way.

If the external database is one from an unrelated company on the Internet then the only way around that is to create a little translation routine or, if you’re lucky and it’s only the names that are different, a translation table.

From a purely practical point of view, the table is the way to go if that can be accomplished and that’s what I’ve done in stage one of the roll-out of the integration of a propery feed for my listings sites. Simple things such as my use of the proper name for the Algarve (ie “Faro”) whereas they use the more popular “Algarve” are easy to allow for like this and indeed just doing that this morning as bumped up the percentage of information that I’ve been able to include quite considerably.

Why not just rename things in my own database? I could do that at the moment but the problem is that I intend to integrate other databases in due course to improve the coverage of my own site and at some point I’ll need to be able to translate terms as there’s no common usage of terms across the various databases that I’m looking for.

Where things get much more difficult is if the basic structure of the information provided by the external system is radically different from that which your own system uses and then you can potentially be talking of quite a bit of work. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way around this.