ERP

Running a business using only accounting data can be pretty much the same as driving a car using rear-view mirror only. The purpose of accounting is to provide accurate and reliable overview of financial situation to interested parties. What this financial overview consists of is the stuff that has happened in the past, in other words: history.

When referring to their ERP systems, it is pretty common that customers refer to it as accounting software . While it is true that every ERP system embeds some accounting functionality, there is a major difference between these two categories of software.

Early versions of SQL Server option for Microsoft Dynamics NAV (then called Navision) didn’t scale up as high as one would expect. Although SQL Server itself could scale up to thousands and tens of thousands of concurrent users, running a production environment of an ERP system is way different from running generic lab tests.

One of the choices a customer interested in Microsoft Dynamics NAV must definitely make is the choice of the database platform. With NAV, there are two possible options: so called native database server, which is not really officially called that (the official name is Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV Database Server), and Microsoft SQL Server.

I first heared about Navision five years ago, when I was working as a .NET developer on a web shop project. One of my tasks was to integrate the ordering functionality with customer’s existing system using the fixed format document exchange.