Last year, we abaondoned DNN in favor of a homegrown portal for one reason.  It is beyond hell to migrate installations from one Database/server to another.  This is pretty important if you want to have a development enviornment and a production enviornment as any good organization should.

This is many because DNN uses the Idenetity colums as the primary keys on its database.  Since these are generated by the database, an entry in the development database could be 100 and when you copy it over to production, it might get the number 35 assigned to it.  This isn't much of a problem except lots of outher tables are refering to this record and expect it to be 100 when it's 35.

So, to get to my question, has DNN come up with  a simplified way to migrate portals and their data from one database /server combo to another.  I miss much of the functionality and modules on DNN.

William,

This issue is a real pain, but it is quite easy to solve (if I understand your scenario).

The first case is when you just want to migrate one installation of DNN to new server.

What I do in such case (migrating one DNN installation to another) is

1. Backup the source DB

2. Copy the files of the source installation to the target FTP

3. Create a new DB in the target. Give it the same name of the source DB

(You don't have to give the same user/Pass since you can create a new one and change the web.config accordingly)

4. restore the target DB with the backup file you created from the source DB

5. create a new user (as I said I do not bother with the old one) and password in the restored DB (the target)

6. Change the connection string in restored site's  web.config to have the new user and password as well as the new server address (do not change anything else in the web.config) do it for both connection string in the file

7. If the domain name is changed too  You can also change the value in the portalalias table as needed. Change only the domain name value and keep portals ID.

That's it. start the site in the new location.

If you want to restore a table (not the whole portal) you can read the following thread which I think can give you good insight on how to do it.
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic478210-338-1.aspx

(I may be off your question, if so, please try making it clearer)