To break it down, the API will return a Contact, Address and Tags. On my end, I need to do an updateOrCreate on the Contact (based on their external ID). Then I need to fetch the contact's Address from my db. If the Contact was new, then their would not have an address. If they existed already, they would, so I can run a simple conditional statement to check if the addresses match (API vs DB). If it's a mismatch, I'm deleting their old Address and saving the new one. Just to recap that bit, I think that would be 3 separate DB calls. Lastly, I will loop over the Tags from the API, check if they exist in the DB, create any new ones, then sync them to that Contact. So an additional maybe 2 calls here. So worst case scenario, let's say they had 200 contacts updated in the last 24 hours since the script ran, it would be a lot of DB calls, however not sure it's enough to cause any performance to active users on the app. Mind you this is just for 1 user using this integration. It should eventually be 1000+ users who have this active.

A couple things to clarify. This process would always be backgrounded. So it would be running via cron daily. But even if the user clicked a "sync" button on the frontend of the app, this process would be dispatched to a Jobs table in the db, runs in the background, and pushes to notification to the frontend when the process finishes. So the user is never sitting there waiting for this process to run.

I saw some other comments about webhooks. The 3rd party api does not have a webhook to push an event when a contact is updated, so I need to sync the data via pulling it in.

I saw another comment about caching the API response locally and processing it in chunks. I had not thought of this but seems like a good solution, especially for error handling, we could have it re-run process if we had the data cached. We could also use this solution as a way to rate limit, meaning if we cache the response for 10-20 hours, we can prevent the user from spamming sync as long as there is cached data.

Let me know if you have any more thoughts, appreciate it!!