CAM Retail STAR to Microsoft RMS

A project I'm just finishing up included a lot of data manipulation. The customer was using CAM Retail STAR point of sale (POS) software to manage their inventory and run their cash registers. They decided they wanted to upgrade to a POS system that better met their needs, and they chose Microsoft RMS.

The challenge - given two separate POS software products, move all customers, orders, credit vouchers, and of course inventory from the old to the new. This is gonna be a hard one.

My resources to start where:
-A Microsoft RMS demo application
-A backup file from Retail STAR
-My head

That's IT!

I figured out the RMS database a couple years ago, so I was pretty familiar with that one. And RMS runs off of SQL Server, which I am also quite familiar with.

I had no idea what I was up against with Retail STAR. The customer had no idea what database it used, and communication with CAM was not an option for obvious reasons. Eventually, I don't remember exactly how, I figured out Retail STAR runs on an embedded database product I've never worked with before - Gupta's SQLbase. Restoring that database backup file from the customer was not easy, to put it lightly. But I got it done.

Okay so now the easy part was over - I had access to both databases on my development machine. Now for the hard part - get the data from one to the other.

Eventually, I found all the data I needed, and where it needed to go. I had to do all kinds of nifty scripts and sql to get this data into RMS correctly. The two POS systems store their data quite differently, so it was never a simple one to one translation.

End result - I got the data imported, and the customer can now move to RMS without interuption of their business. They close up shop on day, and get me a database backup. I import into RMS, which we deploy to their RMS system overnight. In the morning, the sales people come in to see new cash regisister machines with all the inventory, customers, etc. in the new system, as it was end of day yesterday.

How crazy is that? If you ever need to move from CAM Retail STAR to Microsoft RMS, call us. It's not something you want to do, trust me.

We also had to make a website that ran off of Microsoft RMS - pulled inventory from it, and sent orders to it. That alone is super complex, so I'll save that for another story.