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Thread: mySQL

  1. #1

    Default mySQL

    I have a POS (Point of Sale) system that we spent thousands on the licensing for years ago and paid a monthly subscription fee of $149 a month for. The POS system has a few issues as do most I suspect but is mainly reliable. However I've become annoyed with the company recently. A basic report broke over a year ago showing incorrect totals for my sales figures. Now I checked my credit card yesterday and saw a transaction for $396 for a month instead. Apparently they'd changed their licensing model and sent an email in April but sent it to a dead email address from before I took over the company despite it being my card, registered to my account, registered to my email address. They've offered to change the contract to $276 per month but that is still a big increase and I'm annoyed with them now.

    So I've started looking around and found an Open Source system: https://sourceforge.net/projects/unicentaopos/

    That system is free of charge to use since its open source, or an optional £60 per annum to get access to technical support from them. A bargain it seems crazy not to go for that. One issue though is my current POS is all on Apple iPads and iPods while this system only works on Windows 10 or Linux. So I've bought a cheap refurbished Win 10 tablet from eBay and want to download the thing and play around with it.

    One thing I've been advised is that we would need to set up our own database using mySQL and they recommend a database admin does that. Obviously that was part of the licensing fee we were paying the other company for and hiring a consultant to run a database for us would probably eat into the savings I'd need to pay for replacing all our POS tablets etc. OTOH this is business-critical so it might be a madness not to get an IT expert to set it up for us. The system uses mySQL.

    I have no experience with mySQL. Is it reasonably simple to pick it up for a well-meaning amateur with access to Google?
    Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
    ℬeing upset is understandable, but be upset at yourself for poor planning, not at the world by acting like a spoiled bitch during an interview.

  2. #2
    Kind of? It depends? It's the sort of thing you get taught in Introduction to Being A Computer Guy type courses. Honestly, these questions are somewhat like someone asking how hard it is to Write Stuff in English - it depends on what you're wanting to write: 'See spot run' vs a PhD thesis. You could learn how to run some queries to pull some information out of some tables in about half an hour, but a database administrator to a large company is a well paid job that requires serious qualifications and experience. They are both 'sql'.
    When the sky above us fell
    We descended into hell
    Into kingdom come

  3. #3
    So, this whole thing is a kind of dangerous trap if you don't know what you are doing.

    Is setting up MySQL easy? Yes, fairly. It takes a bit of know-how but it's not something that should take more than a day of googling and configuring to set up a basic environment. Maybe a bit longer to get it all configured and set up on your network.

    But that's where the problems start, because even though you have a system that apparently works it's not really ready for real-world use. For starters you are going to need backups, and that seems obvious enough but actually testing those and making sure they can be restored from in a timely matter is a whole other ball game. What about security? That's a big one that's easy to forget, and forgetting ends in run. What of day-to-day administration, ensuring you don't run out of disk space and maintaining the software and hardware itself. How about replication and fail-over? Do you even need that, and if so how do you need it implemented. Does the software configure your tables fully, or will you need to do some of that manually? There are tonnes more issues that are 'common knowledge' for someone experienced but a dangerous pitfall for someone who isn't.

    Heck, there's a good reason even many mid-large sized companies use a hosted solution like AWS or so rather than managing in-house. And yes, they often have problems of large-scale which you probably don't have, but still my advice is: if this is something your livelihood depends on, get a professional.

  4. #4
    Thanks Cracky. You're right that my livelihood depends upon this so I've spoken today to someone who has agreed to help set it up.

    Steely - I thought I'd given enough details to make my usage of it clear. Its neither "see Spot run" nor a PhD thesis. It's for the POS for my business.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
    ℬeing upset is understandable, but be upset at yourself for poor planning, not at the world by acting like a spoiled bitch during an interview.

  5. #5
    Late to the party, but if you know how to diagnose and fix technical problems via google, you should be fine with MySQL. It's pretty easy to set up and use. This forum is actually powered by MySQL.

    I'd recommend hosting it on AWS or Azure, especially if you depend on it for your business. That way, somebody else is on the hook to provide all the uptime and resiliency, and it's someone with enough resources to guarantee they do a good job on it. I've been running a SQL server on Azure for the past five months, and that's been very easy and painless. I'm paying only about $20 a month, and I hit that database pretty hard (~10 queries a second of varying complexity, 24/7). I have no direct experience with Azure MySQL, but I imagine it's basically the same and just as easy to set up and run.

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