[ale] SugarCRM Schema

[cfowler at outpostsentinel.com (Chris Fowler)]

I'm working on converting ACT! 2007 to Sugar and the schema is driving
me crazy.

I'm starting to wonder if a rookie designed their database or if I'm the
rookie looking at it.

a).  Foreign keys have different names!

accounts.id = client.client_id

WTF!  Now I downloaded a java program to map ther database and no
relation ships could be found.  I then had the same program map a
database I designed and it found all the relationships. 

b)  Primary keys are chars.

This one I'm not sure I understand.  In the user table there is a
primary key that is a char and can be NULL.  Again why is this?  In my
tables all my primary keys are integers and auto increment.  Now I
thought maybe they had an odd key so after I created the standard
database I looked at the admin user and his users.id is 1.  Looks like
an integer to me!

I did a test insert where I did not specify a key and it was set to
NULL.  Apparently when I import users from ACT! I'll need to keep a
counter and increment that counter by 1 and set that as the key.

I don't know, I'm just ranting, but their database looks like it started
out as and idea and it is now too late to standardize on anything.