combining records from two databases

[Kay]

I have two databases. One is membership information to a club. One is for the very same members but info regarding a purchase they all made. This should be in one database and we want to report that way and continue that way in the future. They have the membership number in common. Instead of recreating database2's field definitions in database1, importing db2's records and then doing a data cleanup, is there a way I can combine them?

Thanks so much!

[LiveOak]

If records in one file are members and records in the other file are purchases, I'm not sure you should combine them. Would you then need multiple records per member? What is a record in this new file? A purchase? A member? The key question is whether you want to include the data from the second file in the original records of the first file OR add the records from the second file to those in the first.

In one case you would need to add fields and do a lookup, in the other, add fields and do an import.

-bd

[Kay]

The purchase was the membership cost itself, a one-time fee (and associated other info: date & location of purchase etc.). For instance, in Members there is a record for member #1 with contact data etc. and in Membership Purchases there is a record for member #1 with the purchase data. There is a record for each member in both databases. So after I added the purchase fields to the member db and imported, I ended up with 2 records for each member#. The original record for each member has the original fields populated and the new imported record has the new fields populated (and they all have the membership# field populated). Is there any way to combine these?