SQL Server

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog has just published a mega-useful post about recommendations for configuring Microsoft SQL Server for optimum Microsoft Dynamics NAV Performance. If you haven’t yet, you should check it here .

April. There is definitely something upside down with this month. I’ve started it with a somewhat ambitious decision to blog a post a day. And it worked. Kind of. For the first eight days, anyway. And then it happened. Suddenly I’ve found myself blogging only occasionally, practically chasing my promise to deliver a blog post twice a week.

This is bazillionth time that I’ve encountered this issue, so I’ve decided to post a solution to it. If you live in a country which doesn’t have Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 localized version yet, you might have tried installing the W1 (worldwide, English, non-localized) version. Did it work out?

Microsoft Dynamics NAV blogosphere wasn’t particularly active in February. Trust me, I don’t blame anyone for it. February is a slow month. Economy is down, forests are burning in Australia, planes are crashing in Netherlands. Whatever the reason, NAV bloggers weren’t as active in February, as they were in January.

[Updated] I had to update this post a little bit, see below for the details, but the killer feature had to go 🙁 [/Updated] Remeber that tool “ Automated Version Management ” that I published here and on Mibuso five months ago? It has just got an update: version 2.0.

Never trust the customer 🙂 We were sure that the server had last service packs applied, that’s the first that we asked of the customer IT, and got a definite answer that “But, of course!”. So we didn’t really think this might be an issue. Then we noticed that SQL Server build number was 1399, while my laptop was running 3042.

I had no clue how good my laptop was. Seriously. Today it kicked ass of an 8-processor server. Tomorrow we have a go-live of a Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployment, with manufacturing customized to support configure-to-order functionality. Refreshing manufacturing orders now calculates dynamic BOMs and routings, and it takes time.

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.

When I posted my last relevant post on this blog, I’ve got a comment from infonote (a visitor) how bad it was that Microsoft Dynamics NAV can’t use a versioning system. Well, as the matter of fact, it can. One of the nice things in NAV is that at any given moment, the development environment is just a Shift+F12 away.