Abra Suite users are moving to Sage HRMS, and for good reasons. One is the powerful, underlying database, Microsoft SQL Server (SQL Server)®. This infrastructure upgrade alone—from Microsoft Visual FoxPro (FoxPro)® to SQL Server—is reason enough to make the move.

Database Management System of the Year

SQL Server recently received DB-Engines Database Management System of the Year award for 2016. DB-Engines, created and maintained by the Austrian IT consulting company, solid IT, is an initiative to collect and present information on DBMSs.

The award is determined by the DBMS’s increase in popularity during 2016. DB-Engines’ methodology includes tracking the number of mentions for DBMS receives on websites, Google Trend searches, and tweets. DB-Engines also considers online technical discussions about the product and the number of mentions of the DBMS in job offers and profiles on professional networks like LinkedIn.

What it means to Sage HRMS

Here are three advantages SQL Server provides for Sage HRMS users:

1. Speed and performance

SQL Server’s performance strength is recognized by Gartner who places it furthest in completeness of vision and highest for ability to execute in their recent Magic Quadrant report for ODBMS. SQL Server provides faster search results and report computations. It processes requests from users and returns only the requested results. Since minimal information is transmitted over a network, response time improves and network bottlenecks are eliminated. This makes SQL Server an ideal database for the applications.

2. Security

For six years in a row, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) public security board has stated that SQL Server has had the fewest security vulnerabilities compared with other database vendors. Gartner has rated it the most secure ODBMS for the past seven years.

SQL Server 2016 includes a layered approach to security, protecting the data as well as access to it, and providing monitoring capabilities. Its security features include these as well as others:

• Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) – protects data in data files.
• Support for Transport Layer Security (TLS) – updated to version 1.2, protects data in transit and protects from “man-in-the-middle” attacks.
• Least-privilege principle – provides restricted access to data with user-level security. Permission is granted to accomplish defined tasks. In FoxPro, data is stored in flat files on a file server, so network security is all or nothing. Once a user has access to the data, they can add, modify, delete, or copy the information.
• Automatic backup – provides scheduled backups that helps ensure database safety. You don’t need to remember to backup files yourself.

3. Scalability

SQL Server can support your company as it grows. It can scale to petabytes of data for enterprise-grade relational data warehousing. In essence, there’s no limit to the size of a SQL Server database. It can handle millions of records and database requests. For example, Sage HRMS users have access to unlimited online check history maintained in the system.

As a flat file system database, FoxPro has a limit of 2 gigabytes for a table file. This table file size limit along with performance issues often require Abra Suite users to utilize a third-party archival tool for storing check history offline.

Interested?

If you’re an Abra Suite user, these are just a few advantages you would find by migrating to Sage HRMS.

Contact us or follow these links for more information:

• Sage HRMS
• What’s new in Sage HRMS 2016
• Meet and respond to the HR management challenges you face every day
• Success Stories