The Zend Developer Zone has a new article that supplements a podcast from the PHP Abstract series recently given by Lorna Mitchell on "Data Importing".

It is a simple walkthrough of some examples of the techniques mentioned in the podcast. It is much easier to visualise queries and data structures if written down, so here we look at an example of each of the points mentioned.

Her examples convert employee information over from one table to another via some SQL queries and splits out the information into the parts to fill the table (done with inserts and updates).