Recommend user-to-user web site with advice on Lyris ListManager?

July 20, 2010 2:00 PM

Please recommend a user-to-user web site with technical advice on Lyris ListManager. One of our employees accidentally deleted ~6,000 e-mail accounts from their Lyris list. We're a non-profit, and our support contract has ended.

I'm looking for a place where I can ask more questions about this SQL query. I assume it's not an appropriate question for MeFi due to the highly technical content.

This will restore my members, but can someone recommend joins to other tables that would restore history and conversions for this data?

INSERT INTO
[lyris].[dbo].[members_]
SELECT *
FROM [lyris_backup_db].[dbo].[members_]
WHERE List_ = 'my_list'

I have attempted a variety of keyword searches that exclude the Lyris.com domain, including http://www.google.com/search?q=lyris+listmanager+advice+-site:lyris.com

posted by jtherkel to computers & internet (3 answers total)

“Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey”

One presumes you don't have a decent offline backup. Given the usual caveats—IANYDBA, etc.—I'd "create table scratch_monkey as select * from [lyris].[dbo].[members_]" for some extra insurance first, then then run your query. If your backup table has the data you're looking for, that looks like it'll work.

Then I'd get on making having decent offline backups priority one.
posted by ob1quixote at 3:16 PM on July 20, 2010

Thanks for the reply! We have good SQL backups. My question relates specifically to Lyris ListManager because the members_ table includes ~1 million members in 100+ lists for the entire server.

I'm seeking to restore only 6,000 accounts for a specific list, without introducing problems for other lists. I'm pretty sure I can do that with the query in my original post, but ideally, I would import all the related data on clicks, conversions, mailings received, etc. That's where it gets complicated.
posted by jtherkel at 7:37 AM on July 21, 2010

I see. I wish I knew more about the software in question. Maybe try Stack Overflow?

Your other option is to figure out which members aren't in the live table first and save that off someplace. Something like


create table members_not_in_production as
select a.member_id
from [lyris_backup_db].[dbo].[members_] a
where not exists (select 'X' from [lyris].[dbo].[members_] b where b.member_id = a.member_id)

Where member_id is the name of the primary key column. Presuming the ancillary tables you want to restore have member_id as a foreign key, you could go through them one by one creating a scratch monkey and then using your table of deleted member_ids as a constraint to restore the missing rows.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:59 AM on July 21, 2010