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As you will have noticed, the PokerStrategy Elephant now supports full backup of your databases to ensure data integrity especially in cases of version upgrades and associated reimports.
Why is reimporting necessary at all?
With new versions of the Elephant it is now and then necessary to reimport your handhistories, because it is the only way for us to fix errors in calculations due to wrongly imported hands. With an analysis tool like the Elephant, we have loads of data to cope with, especially since the introduction of the new expert values. In order to present the results in a quick manner, we do a technical trick that is called caching. Caching allows us to store calculated values (like the Vp$ip, WTS etc) without having to calculate them over and over again. It is obvious, that looking up a single value is way faster than recalculating the same value from hundreds of thousands of hands.
Unfortunately, the method of caching is somewhat error-prone - assume a handhistory that cannot be properly parsed for whatever reason (some might remember the recent change of the handhistory format by PartyPoker for instance). The Elephant misinterprets this hand and thus produces a wrongly calculated value. As we have no way of knowing what values have been miscalculated, we need to recalculate all values. The quickest way to do so is by completely reimporting all hands currently in your database.
How does the reimport work in versions V0.64 and up?
Starting with version 0.64, we have introduced a database backup mechanism, that allows you to export all your imported handhistories into a folder of your choice. When doing an export, three kinds of files are exported:
- original handhistory files (like those from PartyPoker or PokerStars)
- proprietary handhistory files (in cases of portals for which there are no "real" handhistories, like PokerRoom or the old Mansion databases). These files get an .ehx (for elephant handhistory export) extension.
- additional userbased files (like comments on players of games)
The same mechanism is used to do a reimport. First you are asked to export your database, then the database is cleared and the exported data is reimported.
Known issues
We have extensively tested and improved the export functionality of the Elephant. The only known error up until now is, that when reimporting .ehx files (the proprietary handhistory files) the displayed number of imported files in the handhistory-tab is incorrect - so if you only import ehx-files, the import count will always be 0. Still, all hands are properly imported as you will be able to see in the other tabs as soon as the import has finished.
Summary
I hope this give a little insight into the export process. If you have any questions regarding this topic, feel free to ask in our support forums:
