Your Windows 2000 OS should have at least Service Pack 4 installed (you can obtain it from: this link). If you have Internet Explorer 5.01 or greater installed, the SyncTables setup should run without problems.

If you only have Internet Explorer 5.0, you will have either to upgrade to a more recent version of Internet Explorer (available at: this link).

If you don't want to upgrade, you will need to install the .NET Framework manually before running the setup. In order to do this, first you must install Windows Installer 3.1 (from: this link) and then you need to install the .NET Framework redistributable (available here: this link). Then you should run the SyncTables setup.

SyncTables supports:

• MySQL version 4.1 and 5.0; for tunneling, PHP 4.4 or greater is required
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005
• Microsoft Access 2003 and 2007

This error occurs when your PHP server uses older MySQL client libraries. Here is an article that explains the cause of the problem and gives several solutions: http://dev.MySQL.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/old-client.html

This feature is planned for the future. If you are interested in this feature please send a feature request on the contactpage.

SyncTables uses standard XML files for storing the session configuration. You can edit these files using an XML editor, or a simple text editor. The XSD schema used by these files is available here.

Start SyncTables user interface, go to Help / About. The About dialog will show you the version of SyncTables you are running.

To find out more details about the synchronization process, you can view a diagram here from your browser. It describes all the synchronization operations in a flowchart.

For details related to how a data type is mapped when converting between two different databases, take a look at these conversion tables containing all the type mappings.

Copy Complete does a full data transfer, and completely replaces the table in the destination database with the one in the source database. Any changes in the table structure are transferred as well.

1 Way Sync does only a partial data transfer, by copying only the rows that have changed in the source database since the last synchronization. This works much faster than Copy Complete, but it has some restrictions - see below

Here are the conditions for 1 Way Sync to work properly:

• The synchronized tables must have a primary key and a date-time field containing the moment when each particular row has been modified. It is up the user to ensure that these conditions are respected.
• The source and destination tables must have the same fields, and they must be of compatible types. If the fields are different (for example, after an update to the structure of the source database), then the transfer will fail - unless the user configures the option "Do Copy Complete on SQL error", in which case a Copy Complete is performed instead.

SyncTables uses UTF-8 / Unicode internally, and connects to the databases also in UTF-8 / Unicode, which means the characters are definitely preserved during the data transfers.

There is one case in which the characters may not be preserved correctly - when performing a 1 Way Sync between two tables that use different characters sets (non Unicode). SyncTables will transfer the source text correctly, but the destination table will not be able to save all the characters as in the original text. This is not a problem for Copy Complete, because Copy Complete re-creates the destination table with the UTF-8 character set, which means it will be able to hold any text, regardless of the source character set.

Sometimes the PHP tunnel might return errors that are blocked before reaching SyncTables - in this case you will be informed that there was an error, but you will not be able to see what the actual error message was.

• To enable the detailed log file, create a file called "synctables.log" in the same directory on your webserver as "synctables.php" and give write permissions to it. A detailed log of all actions happening in the PHP file will be written to the file.
• Another way of debugging is to install Fiddler 2 from here: http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/version.asp

  Start Fiddler before connecting to the tunnel, and you will be able to see, in Fiddler, the entire conversation between SyncTables and PHP.

This issue can sometimes occur when MySQL has been configured using the automatic configuration tool. What you need to do is to look in the "my.ini" file from the MySQL program folder, and check if the following line (the "..." will be an actual character set):

default-character-set= ...

appears twice in the file. If it does, remove the last occurrence (to keep only one), and restart the MySQL service.

SyncTables supports using the Task Scheduler in Windows, and it can automatically create a new task for you. Start SyncTables user interface, configure the synchronization parameters, and, in the last page (Save), save your session then click "Schedule Session Using Windows Scheduler". This will create a new scheduler task, and will display the configuration dialog.

In that dialog, you will have to configure:

• In the Task tab, you should provide the credentials for the user account under which you want the synchronization to run; pay attention when doing this in with SQL Server configured with Windows Authentication - the configured user account should be able to access the SQL Server database. Alternatively you can check "Run only if logged on", in which case you don't need to provide any credentials.
• In the Schedule tab, you should create a new schedule and configure it to run whenever you need to.

After the task is saved, it should automatically run according to the schedule. The log file will be generated in the same folder where you've saved your SyncTables session.

You need to add a line in the BAT file, containing the full path to the synctables.exe executable and the full path to your session file; use quotes if any of the paths contain spaces. For example:

"C:\Program Files\SyncTables\synctables.exe" c:\MySession.sync

If the synchronization is completed successfully, the ERRORLEVEL variable will be set to 0, otherwise it will have a value different from zero. This is good to know if you have a more complex BAT file, with conditional actions and so on.

Version 1.0 is a fully functional version. Version 1.0 expires on September 1st 2008. Version 1.1 will be available in August.

A registered version will be available in August 2008. Version 1.0 is downloadable now and functional without limitation.

Use the form on the contactpage to send us anything regarding SyncTables.