As an Apex developer, you probably focus a lot of your
attention on your application and its logic.  But all applications float on a vast sea of
data, and that data has to come from somewhere.  When you work with the power of the Salesforce
On-Demand platform, you very well may be moving existing applications to the
new environment.  These applications
probably already have their own seas of data that you have to get into custom
objects.

 The Apex Data Loader is designed to help you move the data
from external data sources to their new home on Salesforce. This handy utility provides a GUI interface
that lets you insert, update or upsert (a combination of the previous two) data
from a comma-separated variable file or a relational database.  In addition, you can move data from Salesforce
objects into either target, or delete records from Salesforce. You can even call the Data Loader from the
command line for batch operations or scheduled jobs.

If you aren’t familiar with this useful tool, this new page
on the Apex Developers’ Wiki will give you a good starting point. The page includes links to documentation and
articles that will help you understand and effectively use the Apex Data
Loader.  The Data Loader itself comes
with any edition that supports API access – Unlimited Edition, Enterprise
Edition and Developer Edition.

Take a look and have some fun – well, if not fun, at least
move some data around.