I am currently working on our e-commerce system. I am upgrading our existing system to a new version of our e-commerce software.
One of my tasks is importing our catalog into the new system. I know what you’re thinking, just export from the one system, import straight into the new. Well, no! Not quite. The two are completely incompatible and you can’t automatically import the existing database into the new system 
The vendor hasn’t provided an import tool.
What this has brought into sharp relief is just how hard data manipulation is.
Perhaps if I were using a *nix system things might be different. But, even there it can take a long time to figure out all of the different tools and how to plug them together.
One of the things that all modern manipulation tools have in common is that you have to invest a lot of time into learning them before you can get anything out. You also need to be in constant touch with them in order to keep up your knowledge. It would be nice to have tools that can be productive from the off.
If anybody knows of any good tools for manipulating MySQL database, CSV files and the like please leave a message.
