Epos system database Engines.

One of the key pieces of technology in your EPOS retail solution is the database engine used by the software you buy.

As with most software that handles data, the “front end software” is written by a retail EPOS software house, and this application is written to store the data in a database. Sometimes, especially with older technology, this “database engine” was just a part of the EPOS software. However, storing data is in a reliable and scalable manner is a technically difficult task. You have to handle data integrity, backups, transactions and resilience. In this day and age, most software houses will use a third party database engine to handle all this for them: There is no point reinventing the wheel.

As a user of a retail EPOS system, you will hardly notice the activity of the database engine. You only use the front end application, and that talks to the database engine. You don’t really need to know the database engine is there, behind the front end software.

However, choosing an EPOS solution provider who has made a poor choice of database engine is setting yourself up for disaster further down the line.

Software producers like Microsoft and Oracle have been producing database software for years, and they have a great deal of experience and producing a reliable, albeit quite expensive product.

Avoid any retail software that uses a “proprietary” database engine. They may well be cheaper, but it is simple not worth the saving. As you system develops and you wish to use third party reporting and analysis systems, e.g. crystal reports, unless you have a decent database to work with, you will be stuck. Also, if problems occour in the data integrity of the proprietary database engine, you can only look to your EPOS solution provider to fix it. On the other hand, thousands of companies exist with vast experience at dealing with products like Microsoft SQL Server.

What do I mean by scale? Well, any EPOS software is going to, more or less, work out of the box. And work quickly. However, take yourself 2 years down the line, is it still going to work just as quickly? Does it force you to archive and discard anything older than 6 months? Modern EPOS software that runs against a decent database engine will keep working for years, and allow you to report quickly over a large volume of data.

Many epos software solutions use standard, but very old database technology. Avoid anything that uses MS Access, Dbase, Paradox etc as the back end database. This solutions do not scale, and are, frankly, old (i.e. 1980s 1990s) vintage technology.

To be honest I would be very sceptical of any EPOS software solution that did not use one of the big three databases as its backend. These are Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server. Anything else is not worth the trouble – a very large percentage of all database applications use these databases as their backend. They might be more expensive, but that is for a reason: They work! Make you get ask the question in the sales process.

These lessons in EPOS system database technology of also very important to learn if you are thinking about writing your own EPOS software.