Getting Started

[John Ralls]

> On Dec 8, 2015, at 1:49 AM, Plutocrat <plutocrat at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Joseph Hesse wrote on Monday, 07 December, 2015 08:42 PM:
>> I have about 15 years of Quicken data, with lots of categories, that I would like to import into gnu-cash. Am I going to have trouble doing this.
> 
> Probably! There's lots of information in previous posts in this forum, so you should probably search for Quicken / QIF and distil relevant info out of it. If you have 15 years' worth of data, then that's probably too much to input by hand. If importing turns into a nightmare, one commonly suggested strategy is to input one year of 'overlap' data by hand, run them in parallel and then carry on with Gnucash when all issues are resolved. 
> 
>> Also, I am experienced using and configuring MySQL. Should I use this rather than the xml file?
> 
> I'd say start with XML, or the zipped xml which is more space efficient and easier to maintain / backup. I think mysql only starts being advantageous if 
> 
> a) you have really big datafiles (eg 10Mb plus), in which case you might find mysql faster, and
> b) If you want to do clever custom reports with MySQL queries. 
> 
> You can easily switch over at any point. 

MySQL won’t be any faster. GnuCash sucks the whole database into memory at startup and makes no further database queries.

Regards,
John Ralls