Welcome back! In the first article of this series, I walked you through the basics of creating and populating a custom table of location data using MapQuest Data Manager. In this article I will take you through the remaining functions that Data Manager offers, and make you a Data Manager expert extraordinaire!
A Multi-Step Process
As you might recall from the first article, to populate your custom table you perform the following steps:
- Create the custom table.
- Generate a text file that contains location information.
- Upload the text file.
Although I showed you how to push data from staging to production, you will normally go through several iterations of data maintenance before doing this push (unless you are one of the few software developers who never make a mistake). These maintenance steps will likely include adding new records, removing existing records, and changing records that are already in the database--basic database maintenance type stuff.
By the way, as I walk you through this article I am going to further refine my own personal collection of locations. I encourage you to come up with your own list of locations, even if you randomly pick them off a map. My locations are pretty standard fare in the D.C. area, but you might choose instead to come up with locations that are closer in proximity to where you live.
With that said, let's look at the database maintenance functions that Data Manager provides for those of us prone to make mistakes. The first is the Clone Table function.
