A Database for a Small Business

[borissherman48]

In a few words. It’s a small (local contractor) business. We have thousands of invoices on Google Drive, but don’t have customer database. We want one, and want it to be on the cloud - on our cloud. We have our site hosted on VPS with MySQL available. The account has plenty of resources for a database in a subdirectory or a subdomain.

We expect to continue using the existing hosted elsewhere email. It won’t be connected to the database. All archives will continue staying on Google Drive. Each database record will have a link to the related folder in the Google Drive. It will keep the database as light as possible.

The database itself should be something like a doctor’s database. To keep customers’ contacts, appointments, notes, yearly checkups, etc. Except we’d like to have it on the cloud, so it can be easily accessed from any connected device, including mobile.

Where to start? Where to look for developers? How much it might cost and how long it would take? I guess we need what is called a front end. What else? Is there software that I could do it myself?

Your input is greatly appreciated in advance

[AdrianG001]

Below is the road map you should follow. Who/how will this exactly be done, depends on who you hire to get the task done. If you looking for this as a one time task, post which you will manage you DB on your own, you get services from providers.

 First, get the data from One drive to MYSQL in a format MYSQL understands. There are third party tools, that can be used within PowerShell script

 To create link between DB record with related folder in Google drive, scripts needs to run on your DB server. This should be a rather seamless task with MS SQL instead of MYSQL.

 Permissions to be set from DB server with permission to write on Google drive, in users context.

To get an estimate of what it takes to achieve what you want, take some sample invoices and test the scripts on them.

Regards,
Adrian