Hi,
I have been told, roumerred, but can't find any documented evidence that it will invalidates your support contract with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 if you modify the database by scripting data into the database manually using TSQL.
Can anyone help with a link or confirmation that this is true.
Thanks in Advance
Iain
As a Microsoft partner I can say with confidence that if Microsoft discovers that you did this, they will essentially tell you that you made unsupported changes and won't help you with your system without you first doing a fresh install. I don't believe you "invalidate" your warranty, but I could be wrong about that.
That being said, the only way they'll know that you did direct SQL inserts is if you do it wrong. I DON'T recommend you attempt this, however. There are a few middleware solutions to achieve this or you could write your own import tool using the SDK.
This article describes what is considered as unsupported: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb928224.aspx
We fought this with a few of our first integrations back in the day, and I have heard the same rumors you have. If MS learns that you've manually entered data into the database directly, they will force a reinstall prior to supporting.
This is a shame, because it is very tempting to dump data directly into the database. The CRM API isn't extremely speedy (it's actually a bit of a terd) and the idea of leveraging the API is a little intimidating to a lot of ETL developers.
We ended up using Scribe Insight (http://www.scribesoft.com/) as our integration platform anytime we push data into CRM. It's not a perfect tool ETL tool, but for CRM integrations it's pretty close. This has proven to be far more efficient than writing your own C# libraries to handle this basic task.
If you're thinking about pushing data into MS CRM with tsql - don't. Give that product a look first.