Lightspeed Retail is a retail PoS system from Lightspeed headquartered in Quebec. Core retail POS features are expanded on higher service tiers with ecommerce option and payments gateway, an accounting system, and a customer loyalty program.
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Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is optimized for analytic workloads, including data marts, data warehouses, data lakes, and data lakehouses. With Autonomous Data Warehouse, data scientists, business analysts, and nonexperts can discover business insights using data of any size and type. The solution is built for the cloud and optimized using Oracle Exadata.
It is perfect for any small business looking for inventory control, Tracking purchase history, and just an all round easy to use software for retail and beyond. I would not use it if I have only a few hundred items or was a larger company that can afford to build my own POS software.
II would recommend Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to someone looking to fully automate the transferring of data especially in a warehouse scenario though I can see the elasticity of the suite that is offered and can see it is applicable in other scenarios not just warehouses.
Lightspeed Retail has great reports that are very easy to read and understand.
Lightspeed Retail is great to train new employees on because of its ease of use. There are not lots of different things that you have to learn just basics.
Very easy and fast to load data into the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
Exceptionally fast retrieval of data joining 100 million row table with a billion row table plus the size of the database was reduced by a factor of 10 due to how Oracle store[s] and organise[s] data and indexes.
Flexibility with scaling up and down CPU on the fly when needed, and just stop it when not needed so you don't get charged when it is not running.
It is always patched and always available and you can add storage dynamically as you need it.
With a larger SKU assortment size, the software really starts to struggle with doing physical inventory after scanning in a few hundred items.
Several times throughout each year Lightspeed went down on us (not our internet connection but actually Lightspeed verified).
Special order system could use a lot of modern improvements (ability to schedule ahead of time, etc.)
Reports are very basic, and will likely require there Lightspeed Analytics to actually get reports useful for day to day operations.
Weak system for receiving purchase orders.
Does not handle items and cases for reordering very well. Have used multiple Point of Sale systems in the past 10 years that allow to set reorder points based on single items, but reorder the case automatically, Lightspeed has no support for this.
It is very expensive product. But not to mention, there's good reasons why it is expensive.
The product should support more cloud based services. When we made the decision to buy the product (which was 20 years ago,) there was no such thing to consider, but moving to a cloud based data warehouse may promise more scalability, agility, and cost reduction. The new version of Data Warehouse came out on the way, but it looks a bit behind compared to other competitors.
Our healthcare data consists of 30% coded data (such as ICD 10 / SNOMED C,T) but the rests is narrative (such as clinical notes.). Oracle is the best for warehousing standardized data, but not a good choice when considering unstructured data, or a mix of the two.
Does not require continous attention from the DBA, autonomous features allows the database to perform most of the regular admin tasks without need for human intervention.
Allows to integrate multiple data sources on a central data warehouse, and explode the information stored with different analytic and reporting tools.
I gave the rating of a 9 because ninety percent of the time when I talk to their support they're very helpful. One of the only real issues I have is there are times where the queue will be 7-9 people deep. When you have an error you don't know how to fix, sometimes this is very troubling. But overall their support is usually quick and friendly.
Understanding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is really simple, and Autonomous databases are even more. Using shared or dedicated infrastructure is one of the few things you need to consider at the moment of starting provisioning your Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.
Lightspeed is faster, sleeker and more modern than our previous POS system. I can’t express enough how easy the online store portion of Lightspeed is - it just intuitive and sometimes, is TOO easy, I feel like I have to be forgetting something. Lightspeed is staying modern and current where our previous POS was not
As I mentioned, I have also worked with Amazon Redshift, but it is not as versatile as Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and does not provide a large variety of products. Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is also more reliable than Amazon Redshift, hence why I have chosen it
Overall the business objective of all of our clients have been met positively with Oracle Data Warehouse. All of the required analysis the users were able to successfully carry out using the warehouse data.
Using a 3-tier architecture with the Oracle Data Warehouse at the back end the mid-tier has been integrated well. This is big plus in providing the necessary tools for end users of the data warehouse to carry out their analysis.
All of the various BI products (OBIEE, Cognos, etc.) are able to use and exploit the various analytic built-in functionalities of the Oracle Data Warehouse.
