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Diamond Database Management

POSIM Diamond saves all of your daily activities to a single database on a server computer. This database will eventually become very large with several years of history. This will cause your program and computer to run slower. There are other advantages to keeping a database well managed such as ease of reporting and access to historical data. This Tech Tip will explain some functions inside the Supervisor Tools program and also how to keep good backups of your data.

Use this file in conjunction with the Installing & Maintenance section of the electronic help manual accessible through any POSIM program’s Help menu.

Supervisor Tools

This icon represents Supervisor Tools and can be found in the POSIM Diamond folder on your hard drive. In order to open this program and manage your database,you will need to log all users off of POSIM (such as Sales Client and Inventory Client) and close the POSIM Share Server program. If you do not, you will receive an error message telling you to do so. Here you can see the menu system that appears when Supervisor Tools is open and active. We will cover each of the File menu options in a separate section below. The choices here deal mainly with managing the data currently in your database. The “Edit Privileges” choice allows you to set up passwords for your users, adding to the security of your data.

File Sizes

This window shows the number of records each file in your database contains. This is useful when deciding whether or not to purge or consolidate history or other data in your database. In the image to the left, there are 222 items in the database. There are only 10 invoices so there would be no need to consolidate or purge old invoices. If you had 100,000 records in your Invoices file, on the other hand, you might consider consolidating if not purging some older data. See the Purge and Consolidate History sections below for more information.

Rebuild Database

If you have been instructed by Technical Support to rebuild your database, you will be brought to this screen to complete the task.

First, click the “Copy All” button and then the “Rebuild All” button. A dialog box will appear asking you where you want to save your rebuilt database. Select the desktop and click “Choose”. This may take some time depending on the size of your database and the speed of your computer. When it has completed, you will find an icon on your desktop similar to this one.

Next, rename your existing database to “POSIM_DBold”. It is found in the POSIM Diamond folder on your hard drive inside the POSIM Data folder.

Last, move the POSIM_DB file from the folder on your desktop (in the first step) to the POSIM Data folder (in the previous step) and restart POSIM.

Consolidate History

If your database has become very large and has become slow over the years, consolidating history is the first option to reducing size and increasing speed. Consolidating History means taking all of the lines from invoices in a month and moving them to a single invoice with all of the inventory and sales information on it. You will still be able to run reports for these periods of time – just not on a daily basis.

Purge

If you have data in your database from 4 or more years ago, you may consider removing that irrelevant data from your database. This will increase the speed of everything from reports to daily operations in POSIM. The Purge window will allow you to purge such things as invoices, purchase orders, A/R history,and transfers.To do this, check the checkbox for the data you wish to remove, enter a date before which you do not want any data to exist, and click the Purge button to execute the operations. More than one can be done at a time. Note that the data purged will not be reportable or accessible after purging. To keep this data and still have the benefits of purging, create a backup of your database which will hold the older data and then purge the data from your live database. This way if you required information from the purged dates, you could restore the backup that holds the data and run the necessary reports. Afterwards, you would restore your live database and continue operations.

Erase Files

The Erase Files option will delete an entire file in your database. If your database encounters an error with batch processing that is unrecoverable, erasing the Batches file will remove all batch records from your database (only recommended with Tech Support help). To clear out all vendors or customers to start from scratch, select each one individually and click “Erase.” A better alternative to erasing files such as POS History or Processed Invoices is purging so you can specify dates to remove and dates to keep.

Edit Privileges

Using privileges will allow you to set passwords to protect your sensitive data. You can restrict users from entering parts of POSIM that they will not need to access. You will also need to set up privileges if you want to keep customer credit card information in your database. By default, all users are locked out of viewing credit card information. For more information about setting up privileges, see the electronic help file accessible through any POSIM program in the Help menu. (Advanced Features)

Backup POSIM Database

To simply backup a POSIM Database, open the POSIM Share Server window (satellite dish icon in the computer’s dock) and click “Backup POSIM Database.” Select a folder to save the backup and click “Choose.” When the backup is complete, you can burn the backup to a CD, DVD or move it to an off-site backup for maximum protection from data loss.

Automated Backup

If you have experience with Automator, you can create an application which, through the use of iCal, will automatically backup your database on a schedule you can set up. Automator is a program you can find in the Applications folder on your computer. Create a new workflow and design it like the following screen shot.

Once you have done this, save it as an application on your computer somewhere you can easily find it again. The Documents folder would work fine.

Lastly, open iCal and set the newly saved POSIM Database Backup application to run when it is most convenient. Midnight or very early morning would work since no one would be using the database and it would give plenty of time for the procedure to complete.

After several weeks your backups may start to take up too much space on your hard drive(depending on the size of your database and the size of your hard drive). Either remove the oldest databases leaving weeks worth (and any month end databases for reporting purposes), or transfer the backups to an external drive of larger size or burn them to CD or DVD to keep in your archives. We recommend you keep at least one week of backup data and the last day of every month (or the first day depending on when your backups run).