Using A Database for Small Businesses.

When managing a business nothing helps more than raw data. Storing that data in a database makes it infinitely more flexible and accessible. A database is an application that efficiently and effectively stores and retrieves data as well as ties that data to other data. Many large scale accounting applications like QuickBooks, PeachTree and many other titles store all their information in some form of a database.

Tables are like spreadsheets. Rows and columns group together data in an organized manner. Databases can have many tables with many columns or just a few. Relational databases like SQL database engines link tables together using what are known as primary and foreign keys. So in the example of an invoice the Customer table has a Primary key uniquely identifying a specific customer from the rest of all of the customers. The Invoice table stores a foreign key in its table so the match between customer id’s links the two tables. The invoices themselves also have a primary key so that there can be many invoices for the same customer. These concepts are actually born of a mathematics branch known as Algebra.

Data at its most basic level is a specific bit of information. Like the number 19 or a specific date and/or time. A database holds these bits of data and an application built to interact with a database is used to generate information from the data. A clearer example is the invoice. An invoice has quantities, part numbers, serial numbers, account numbers, dates and even totals which are not stored in the database but are calculated each time the invoice is accessed. Invoices bring many bits of data to a single entity most commonly referred to as a report. Looking at a common invoice explains a transaction with the details stored in many tables all tying back to a single transaction.

Database servers run a service that can be connected over connections on a local area network or over the internet to allow applications on different computers access to data simultaneously. Many websites like Facebook, NASA and even Google make extended use of databases to supply services to millions of users concurrently. Whether it’s over the internet or across a physical office space, a database can be the heart of a businesses information technology.

SQL databases conform to an industry standardized set of functionality so that complex queries can be performed without knowing the underlying technical architecture.

Open Source

Open Source is usually associated with applications that are free to download, distribute and modify. Many times open source applications are developed by a community of developers over the internet that take feature suggestions from the user community and build them into the application. Open source applications tend to follow one of several ‘licenses’ like the GPL or General Public License to make sure the program is unmolested or incorporated into a proprietary software trying to take credit for the programming code.

There are many examples of open source titles here.
http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/All

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_software_packages

Open Source Databases

One aspect of open source known as LAMP has become wildly popular as the internet has matured. Lamp stands for Linux, the operating system, Apache, the web server component, MySQL, a wildly popular free and open database engine and the P stands for Perl, Python or PHP the three most popular languages of backend programming. Combining these components provides a very fertile ground for developing Web Applications that can be served across an office or the world. Many sites like Google and WordPress take full advantage of these technology to create feature rich applications that run in a web browser but work like a traditional desktop application like Microsoft Word. Being open source allows anyone to build on top of or out of the offering. This means you can customize the programming of any of these applications to best fit your particular style or way of doing business. This is a huge time saver for any small business.

Some common examples of open source applications that utilize Lamp architecture are listed below:
SugarCRM – A contact and lead management system to manage a sales force.
WordPress – The most popular blogging application on the internet.
OpenCart – An extremely flexible shopping cart software.
GNUCash – A full fledged accounting program.

Mobile Devices

Today we have smartphones and tablets that have web browsers built in and available for each platform. Using new techniques known as adaptive or responsive web layouts, information on a page automatically transform a web page to smaller displays. So any page can be designed once and displayed on a desktop browser, a tablet browser or a mobile phone browser. This allows web designers to best optimize the content for smaller displays while leaving the pages viewed on a desktop for a larger view. Using responsive design techniques your business data can even extend to mobile devices like iPhones and Android or Blackberry phones and tablets. The potential is huge for your business.

Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Point of Sale Tagged with: Android, bits, blackberry, data, database, e-commerce, information technology, Iphone, MySQL, open source, relational, shopping cart, smartphone, SQL, tablet