Choosing between imports and reports

It is important to understand the customers requirements before making the decision to go with a report or an import.

The following table summarizes the information from the previous section. Using this table as your decision tree, you can evaluate all of the criteria of each approach to make an informed decision based on a requirement.

Table 1. Choosing between imports and reports
Function	Import	Report
Catalog Locking	Yes	No
Enhanced Performance	Yes	No
Update Multiple Catalogs	Yes	Yes
Ease of Development for Simple Import	Low	Medium
Ease of Development for Complex import	High	High
Scheduled	Yes	Yes
Versioning	Always	Optional (Scripted)
Infrequent Small Imports	Best	Good
Infrequent Large Imports	Best	Good
Frequent Small Imports	Poor	Best
Frequent Large Imports	Poor	Poor