title: batch manipulations for online web app
body: <p>A customer has a web based inventory management system. The system is proprietary and complicated. it has around 100 tables in the DB and complex relationships between them. it has ~1500000 items.</p>
  
  <p>The customer is doing some reorganisations in his processes and now has the need to make massive updates and manipulation to the data (only data changes, no structural changes). The online screens do not permit such work, since they where designed at the begining without this requirement in mind.
  The database is MS Sql 2005, and the application is an asp.net running on IIS.</p>
  
  <p>one solution is to build for him new screens where he could visialize the data in grids and do the required job on a large amount of records. This will permit us to use the already existing functions that deal with single items (we just need to implement a loop).  At this moment the customer is aware of 2 kinds of such massive manipulations he wants to do, but says there will be others.This will require design, coding, and testing everytime we have a request.</p>
  
  <p>However the customer needs are urgent because of some regulatory requirements, so I am wondering if it will be more efficient to use some kind of mapping between MSSQL and Excel or Access to expose the needed informations. make the changes in Excel or Access then save in the DB. may be using SSIS to do this.
  I am not familiar with SSIS or other technologies that do such things, that's why I am not able to judge if the second solution is indeed efficient and better than the first. of course the second solution will require some work and testing, but will it be quicker and less expensive?</p>
  
  <p>the other question is are there any other ways to do this?</p>
  
  <p>any ideas will be greatly appreciated.</p>