Database suggestions?

[uvbnserved]

Me and my dad have a small distribution company. currently we have few enough orders that we just enter them on our separate spread sheets and check with each other periodically. We are interested in implementing a database. sort of a central "spread sheet" that we can both read and write to remotely.

I have set up apache servers before but have never looked into databases. Could anyone point me towards the right software for these needs?

Yes I am a "noob" on this topic. go easy on me

[TiTex]

setting up an mysql database it's easy enough , and you can also connect an excel document to it http://helpdeskgeek.com/office-tips/excel-to-mysql/
if you will install mysql on a linux box you will probably install it with your linux distribution app manager like yum (redhat, fedora, centos)
for windows you can download it from here http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
documentation http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/index.html , but you can also google search and you'll find a lot of help for mysql database design and/or usage

[Ben]

What do you expect of setting up your database or in other words, do you plan as (your self called) "noobs" to develop a order processing system?

Did you check if there might be an "out of the box" solution that will help you with your problem? Might be that there is also some open source that fits your needs.

So you might avoid reeinventing the wheel, especially if you are currently not so sure if you need a whole wheel but later on you might do so but did some architectural mistakes in the beginning making it hard to go on.
Besides this you can also avoid doing some commong software dev. mistakes etc. and you can reduce spending your own ressources on "just" keeping your stuff up and running (consider data security, backups etc.) as the it in this case is just the tool to assist with your work

Never the less when working to gether on the same document / documents you will always have the problem of a conflict when writing to the same data source without messing all things up. So even a database by default will not just help you locking records (like you need to lock your xls) when more than one is trying to edit the same record.

To not end up with nothing just words in this post, here are two links as a result from a quick google for open source order management tools, maybe they might go in your direction. If the are good or not (in all belonging - IT and non IT) I can't tell at all.
http://phpbms.org/
http://ofbiz.apache.org/

[falko]

If you use ISPConfig, the ISPConfig Billing Module might be for you...