Hi

Is there a real time solution for synchronizing salesforce and a mysql database using the php toolkit.

Im developing a script that gets information from salesforce and stores it in a mysql database.

The script compares the data that is on salesforce and mysql and updates the mysql data to match what is stored in salesforce.

When a change is made on salesforce is their a way to trigger my php update script to run automatically.

Ever since relationship fields came out, I've always had a hard time getting values from them in a SOQL query.  I've been able to write a reliable function to retrieve values for fields on the main object or in a relationship one level deep, but my function falls down (does not scale) when looking relationships further away. 

For example, the query select id, status, lead.company, contact.account.name from CampaignMember limit 5, I am able to grab Status off CampaignMember and Lead.Company, but my function has trouble getting contact.account.name.

Bottom line is that I wanted to ask the community if they've written a "get a value from an sObject" function that is capable of hanlding relationship fields no matter how many objects away they are.