I have a customer in the Financial Services industry that would like to
upgrade to 3.0. Part of the implementation will be creating a custom entity
to store portfolio information (life insurance, diability, Dental, etc.).
This data is currently stored in a SQL table from another application. I
would like to move this data from its current location to my customer
entity. Do I have to use data migration framework or the sdk to do this or
can i just do this within SQL?
Thanks.

Ideally you would use the SDK to move the data. The DMF probably won't work for you (I'm not sure if it deals with custom entities out of the box or if you'll have to do a bunch of work to make it happen). You don't want to write directly to the database because you'll run into issues where the platform augments the data and you don't have those rules handy (they're in the platform code). Plus, if you write to the database you run a risk of supportability problems.

Mj Miller
Microsoft CRM Technical Lead

** The opinions and comments in this post are my own and in no way reflect the opinions of Microsoft or the Microsoft CRM team. This posting is not an offer of support, either immediate or ongoing, and no support is implied. Some of the information posted may include non-supported workarounds and code samples.