With VME's ongoing upgrade of IntelliStore onto newer Microsoft .Net technologies, the improvements in design and technology have allowed us to greatly increase the rate of new functionality offered into our systems, whilst at the same time allowing us to offer functionality that was previously impossible to achieve.

The latest target of our changes was the ability to offer an alternative to our current epos data store, Microsoft Access. Although it still serves us very well, and we will continue to support it for the foreseeable future, it is not without its issues. Whilst still a very powerful single user database platform, with the advent of multi-threaded applications, network access and todays tighter security requirements, Access falls short in a lot of areas. Anyone who has used an Access database will know the horrors of corruption for no rhyme or reason, and the archaic SQL syntax that requires a master of the dark arts to write!

With our new .net powered IntelliStore POS, our loosely coupled, multi-tiered architecture has made it almost trivial to drop in a new database layer, enabling us to easily add in support for new databases. This has enabled us to now effortlessly update our POS system to upgrade from Access to SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, the latest and greatest free database offering from Microsoft. With this change we can now offer increased performance, improved security, and most importantly massively bolstered reliability – goodbye compact & repair!

Along with a raft of other changes and improvements as part of our on-going improvement program, expect to see SQL Server support released in the very near future.