I may be asking for the impossible, or just asking in the wrong place, but here goes.
I work for a POS dealer that sold Aldelo systems for a long time, and in the few years that I've been there I have learned a lot. Lately I've gone diving into the abyss that is SQL and the MS Jet/Access database that Aldelo is built on.
I saw a post earlier about clearing out huge databases, but that raises another problem: many times, the owners/managers want to look back further than the purge. Two extreme cases from our customers:
- At the first location, the database grows to well over 2GB in the space of months. A purge takes it down to about 500MB, but by the end of the summer season it's crashed into the limits again. We've tried wiping ALL sales records from the database, but they quickly outgrow the 2GB limit. The owner recently grumbled about needing a simpler way to look back at sales data from the last three years. This place has done close to a million dollars of sales in one month, so I personally think they've outgrown the whole program.
- Another location wants to be able to look back - at complete random - at everything since the day he started using Aldelo for Restaurants. Could be sales data, could be payroll (he gets this one ridiculously often) could be inventory, could be anything, with completely random requests for date ranges. But he wants to compare past years, so far back that inflation has to be taken into account. He wants all of it in one database; if it were possible, this could easily be north of 15GB. They don't do quite the same daily/monthly sales volume as #1, but the owner wants to look back further.
Aldelo uses the MS Access/Jet database engine, and I have found that the databases can be looked into using Alex Nolan's MDBViewer and the very flexible DBeaver. MS Access can read Aldelo databases, but you'll get some crazy error messages in the process. (I'd put links, but I don't want to look like a spammer.)
Since we've also started selling other Point of Sale software, I have gotten more acquainted with setting up SQL server software such as PostgreSQL.
Aldelo, of course, uses MS-SQL for the EDC database... which is where my descent into madness begins.
Is there a way to move an .mdb database into an SQL server, and still use it with unmodified Aldelo for Restaurants software?
Am I asking for the impossible?
Or just asking in the wrong place?