Hi,

I want to create a database to manage my companies stock levels. There needs to be a shiny web frontend as well.

Having researched the area, I concluded that MySQL and one of the P's should do the job.

I wanted a colaborative opinion, with any ideas other might have.

Thanks for your time.

Or postgresql, of course.

And while this is a bit of overkill (it does way more than you asked for) ....


Have a look.
http://xiwa.sourceforge.net/




Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for the quick replies. I was meaning actual stock, like materials/items and stocks counting/levels etc. Not stocks and shares.

I was wondering if my approach was sound?

There's nothing wrong with your approach - just that someone has to write the scripts to run daily to inform you what items are running low etc. You'll also need a GUI front end to edit things ... maybe 'pgAdmin' if you use PostGRESQL. It's best to ask someone who deals with MySQL or PostGRESQL for a living; they'll have a good idea of the amount of work needed.

Oh ...

That's quite different from what I thought, sorry about that.

I suppose you could do that quite easily with either of the
DBs and perl or php.

I think you're talking about an inventory management system; if you search Google for "linux inventory management" you'll get more than a few offering that may prove interesting.

Now, if you want to roll your own, you'll need to consider data base design (multiple tables; e.g., customer, vendor, inventory, sales, etc., etc.), data base interface (both GUI and text -- there's nothing worse that making it difficult to administer a data base with a damned GUI), report creation and all the myriad of things you do to see how your business is doing -- that isn't trivial as you probably are aware.

If I was going to do it, I'd build it with MySQL and PHP (so any browser, anywhere can access it). I'd take a good hard look at and a long think about what information I have and what information I need and go from there -- there are a few open source system available plus a few that are not open source (and, frankly, you don't give a hoot if you don't want to maintain a system yourself), take a look, see if something fits your needs.

Hope this helps some.