Being able to efficiently identify and merge duplicate contacts and related data is be an important -- and often time-consuming -- task for organizations getting data from multiple sources. The current CiviCRM dedupe and merge process does not scale well beyond a moderate number of contacts and consequently there has been dicussion on the forums and IRC about optimizing the dedupe and merge code in CiviCRM.
Blog posts by Anónimo
Were you thinking of attending the Mumbai CiviCRM Meet up - July 2010 last Thursday in India or wondering what exactly is shared, discussed, explained, who attended ?…
Sendgrid is a relatively new cloud-based service that takes care of mailing list SMTP delivery and attempts to get the highest possible deliverability rate. We didn't want to have to manage our own SMTP server here at the Participatory Politics Foundation, so when we migrated to CiviCRM recently, we decided to take the sendgrid route for SMTP.
UPDATE: Dec 17, 2010
dharmatech has contributed a similar module to drupal.
d.o. page: http://drupal.org/project/civievent_discount
civi blog: http://civicrm.org/blogs/dharmatech/add-coupons-events-module
great job dharmatech!

A couple month ago I raised the question about CiviCRM importing scalability, and received mixed answers.
CiviCRM should be mostly used for data import, not for data cleaning. Most importing scalability issues stem from people's reliance on the system to perform both data clean up and import. CiviCRM has a great data cleaning process that should be taken advantage of when doing a large import.I am writing this post to take community feedback on porting CiviCRM to PostgreSQL, the best way to do it, and to team up with any possible members willing to contribute to this effort. Here are my efforts until now. I have not been able to make it 'all' work on PostgreSQL, but certainly to a degree where I can see light at the end of the long tunnel. I am linking 3 PostgreSQL compatible files here:
structure.sql - this has the columns, primary keys, indexes, unique constraints data.sql - this is the sample data included with CiviCRM
The next phase of the CiviSchool project is collecting and maintaining all parent / student information online. This avoids the annual filling out forms work by the parents, and also the stuffing of envelopes by school staff during the summer and reentering all the information in the SIS when school starts.
