[rt-users] Merging divergent databases

[Tim Cutts]

On 26 Apr 2012, at 00:54, Phillip Frost wrote:

> I recently experienced a hardware failure that required that I restore the database from a backup that was a few days old. I was later able to recover the database at the time of the failure, but not until some new tickets had been created and others modified.
> 
> Is there some clever way I can query the recovered database for everything that changed since the failure, and then merge it into the live database, which is missing those changes? The difference is not a whole lot, so even a somewhat manual process would be better than nothing.

Oooh, nasty.  I feel for you!  I think you could write scripts to retrieve tickets from one database and merge them into the other, although you'd have to allow the tickets and transactions to have a different id once transferred.

The logic of the script would have to be something along the lines of:

# script 1
connect to source_rt;
search for tickets to transfer;
foreach found ticket {
  dump ticket basics;
  dump ticket requestors, owner, watchers;
  foreach transaction {
    dump transaction;
    foreach attachment {
      dump attachment;
    }
  }
}

# script 2
connect to dest_rt;
open dump file;
foreach ticket in dump file {
  create a new ticket object in dest_rt;
  populate it with basics from ticket (not the ID, obviously);
  set watchers, requestor etc;
  foreach transaction on the ticket in the dump file {
    create a new transaction object in distort;
    populate it;
    foreach attachment on the transaction {
      create an attachment object in the database;
      populate it;
    }
  }
}

You can probably fairly easily lift the appropriate bits of code from the main RT sources.

Regards,

Tim

-- 
 The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research 
 Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a 
 company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered 
 office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.