Retailers face intense competition in a high volume, low-margin environment. To succeed, retailers must be able to increase operating efficiencies and improve sales by personalizing the customer experience, improving sales associate productivity and using multiple sales channels to service customers. Furthermore, retailers must be able to control expenses by minimizing fraud and cost-effectively implementing new systems such as Point of Sale, Just In Time inventory management, and merchandising. In turn, business managers must be able to make real-time decisions based on real time data. The MySQL® database server enables retailers to:

• Reduce IT costs with a cost-effective database that reduces costs and improves profit margins
• Improve visibility into business trends by building high-performance data warehouse applications
• Provide a personalized shopping experience through multiple channels including in-store POS systems, kiosks, and Web applications
• Improve sales associate productivity by building applications that automate the purchasing process.

MySQL helps retailers harness the tremendous amounts of data generated from billions of transactions, millions of customers, and thousands of suppliers. By converting this information into actionable information, retails can increase revenues and decrease costs. In particular MySQL enables retailers to cost-effectively implement six key retail technology initiatives:

• Real-Time Retail by providing customers and suppliers with real-time inventory information
• Multi-Channel Retailing by giving customers a consistent personalized shopping experience across buying channels such as the Web, catalog, retail store, and kiosks
• RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) by building data warehouse applications for real-time analysis of RFID related information including SKUs, inventory count, and location
• Retail Optimization Engine by analyzing terabytes of data to optimize pricing, markdowns, promotions
• Point-of-Sale (POS) by enabling you to quickly deploy zero administration POS systems that integrate with back-end ERP applications.
• Kiosks by providing a low-cost, highly reliable database that can be deployed with hundreds of kiosks that automate the sales process and allow customers to order in stock and out of stock products.

Omaha Steaks and Powells Books are among the growing number of retail organizations that have deployed innovative retail systems that rely on MySQL and have resulted in increased revenues and lower operating expenses.

White Papers

• Guide to Choosing an Embedded Database
• MySQL 5.0's Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture

On Demand Webinars

• Upgrading to MySQL 5.0 for OEMs and ISVs
• For OEMs Only: Embedding MySQL