SunShop changes SQL table structure...AGAIN!!!

Pleth has used SunShop as their shopping cart software for years. It works pretty well, but has a history of changing major things mid-stream in a release cycle. The latest release was no different.

This time, they have moved the categories of a product from the products_categories table into the products table. For most things, this was not an issue, but for some (especially those cross-categorized) their crappy update tool failed to take into consideration products with multiple categories. One shop in particular had 4816 items in their product database and after the update 2500 of them were in a category and 2300 were not. So, I had to restore the database to another location and make a bunch of outfile queries to pull out the needed data, parse it with good ol' bourne scripting, and read it back into the new database. It's working now, but we are positive that there are some products which are still not where they need to be. We have no real way to check without going through every product one-by-one with the customer.

The worst part is that the changelog had NO references to any sql structure changes, only file updates to the cart software. NOTE: If you are going to change things, please tell us FIRST so we can study the impact of it instead of wasting 4 hrs moving SQL data by hand.