Anyone use QODBC for Quickbooks?

[victorydata]

QODBC: Used it, liked it, but, as I recall, slow.
The project this was for died some years ago, so my memories are hazy. It was fun to see all that QB data live in Access. Again I recall a sense of slowness doing queries, and it was all on one machine.

Well that depends. If you are going to communicate with QuickBooks through linked tables, then it will be slow. If you construct queries that grab all the data from a table, then it will also be slow. However, a well formed query goes a long way, only grabbing what you need is key. You should only use linked tables when you want to send a SQL command to do an UPDATE or INSERT, otherwise your best bet is to do pass-through queries and copy whatever tables you need to your local database for SELECT statements. Do whatever reporting you need from the local tables to avoid the comm delays. Additionally, I recommend running the QODBC optimization process so that the B-Tree is formed in SQL. This indexing and sorting is paramount for efficient retrieval of data. That alone would speed it up dramatically.

[HappyJohn]

I used the QODBC driver for a 30-day trial. After the trial I used the built in "Intuit ODBC" driver (it is read only). I noticed a few differences such as:
1. The table names and field names were very different depending whether I used the QODBC driver vs the Intuit ODBC driver.
e.g. With QODBC, the table names were simplified such as "Customer". With the Intuit ODBC driver, the table names have names like:
QBReportAdminGroup_v_lst_customer or
QBAdvancedReportGroup_v_Salesreceipt

2. QODBC had a "sublevel" field to denote the hierarchy of a customer in the customer table.
e.g.
Xerox, Inc would be sublevel = 0,
Xerox, Inc (NYC Branch), sublevel = 1
Xerox, Inc (NYC Branch):Job 141016 water loss, sublevel = 2
With the Intuit ODBC driver, I have yet to find a "sublevel" field.

3. With the QODBC driver, I saw about 150 tables.
With the Intuit ODBC driver, I saw over 500 tables.

With both drivers, I was unable to import/link all the tables I wanted to.

[shadowlips]

I am still going to look at the IIF. My reasoning is that I need to understand what data is easy to update, edit, append. If a specific ledger is updateable through the IIF format, it is probably going to be relatively simple to pinhole into the tables using an API. When you start using API's with complex RDBMS's, you need to understand the necessary constraints to maintain data integrity. I am guessing the IIF files will help me understand the roadmap when I get to the API's.

Just wanted to share my experience. I started with IIF and automated item importing using it. However, there are a lot of limitations and certain things just cannot be customized for example using different tax codes for different products.

I then switched to SDK and never looked back. It's a lot more powerful and it allowed automation of my billings and invoicing. It is also much faster for the user because it writes directly to Quickbooks. (IIF needs user action to manually import)

There is also no licensing fees. You just need to install the SDK on the pc that you need to run the program.

Cheers.

__Shadowlips__