Sometimes Timport may not be practical for the importing you need to do. In cases of specialized loaders, typically being recreated from other loaders there are a few other methods you might consider for getting data into Texis. The most flexible, although likely the most work, is to use the API. This is the same API that Timport and the Vortex engine use, but allows you to do anything you want in your code, you should in general use the NCGDIRECT define when using the API to talk to a database on the same machine. Two other methods that can be used are to use the Perl DBD driver, or the ODBC driver. Due to the extra layer of overhead of Perl and ODBC the performance is typically much slower than an equivalent Vortex script or API program. For that reason they should only be used for data import, or communication with other tools, but not for high volume end-user transactions.

If you are collecting data from a website you might consider using gw from Webinator, or the Vortex script walker. These both can crawl a website collecting data. Gw crawls to a standard Webinator table, from where you could further process the results, while Vortex will let you get at the data while crawling.