So if everything is the same except for new posts and new users, what exactly has to be moved over? I am confused on why you are trying to do this. Are you attempting to port data from the latest 'production' instance back to the old install? I can't think of a reason you would do this, I mean why not just copy production?

It sounds like you are trying to 'merge' two installs which were, at one time, the same thing (and one of those is frozen in time at a point where they were the same). I highly recommend avoiding this. To do this, you would need a pretty detailed cursor or a copy of RedGate SQL Data Compare to port the data over for you. Considering the time it would take and the cost of the tool, I would recommend just buying the tool to do it for you if you absolutely must do this. Still, I am having difficulty understanding why this would need to be done though. 

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Chris Paterra

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Its not exactly that simple because of keys, you have to first create a post for each thread and in turn create a new thread (using the destination's new postid as the new threadid, then update the post you just inserted with the newthreadid). Then, you need to have this 'newthreadid' matched up with the old one so you can then import all posts associated w/ the old threadid (to import as the new threadid). This requires also making sure you have the proper parentid (which is a postid and since you are creating a new postid this will require updating the parentid's as you insert into posts of destination db) so I recommend doing this all in sequential order (based on source db). Keep in mind, a single thread with say 10 posts could in theory have 10 different parentid's with one of those being 0 (the first post is always 0). If you still feel you need to go down this route, you should probably consider making temporary columns in the destination to store the OldThreadID to help work out problems. 

Either before the above or after (but prior to viewing), you need to get the Forum_Users over (which would require something like a select into... where source UserID + PortalID combo NOT IN(... destination Forum_Users), probably done w/ a CURSOR). You do this to make sure a forum user's record exists. 

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Chris Paterra

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