Inventory Database: Which Is The Right One?
It is true your business depends on your Inventory Database to a great extent. Your production unit depends on the regular supply of your raw materials and other consumables. You would also require timely supply of all kinds of spares and components to ensure that your production is not affected. But then how do you ensure that your Inventory Database is dependable and support you at all points in time?
It is not really a big trick. You need to follow the standard practices that are adopted by most of the database selectors to ensure that you get the right database management system for your Inventory Database. The process of selection of the right database is as follows:
1. How big is your Inventory Database? The size of the inventory database that you have got is very important, since some of the database management systems are very stable when the database size is small but as it grows the database might become too volatile. Obviously you do not want to have some thing that is volatile and might cause your data to vanish into the thin air. You need to estimate the size of your database by approximately calculating the tables involved and the size of every table in your case. You can take normally five year data as the need base. Normally, you need not have to store data beyond three years. But for the sake of safety and to incorporate a safety factor, you could go ahead and have data for about five years. This will let you know the size of the database that will go into your Inventory Database.
2. The second important factor you need to check in your Inventory Database is how fast the response has to be. On many occasions, the speed of the database that you have will be decided more by the design of the database. If your people have not really taken that into consideration, then your design might be inherently poorer to that extent. In which case, you might have to find a database that is faster. But on most occasions, you will find that the databases and their speeds are not very different. If your Inventory Database is slow with one, it will be slow with the other too. Therefore, your design is what you should really concentrate on. However, you can select the fastest database to help you do it better. You can always make use of the benchmarking that has been done by a number of people and web sites to check out which of the databases is faster. 3. Finally, of course, you need to check out which is cost effective. The database you have chosen for your Inventory Database might be faster and might be smarter to hold large databases like yours; but if it is not optimal enough in terms of cost, then you need to check it.
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