If you have a minute or two I would appreciate your feedback regarding the usage of the company restore feature, within the NAV classic client.
The background to this is that of looking into the tooling in the classic client, to determine new interfaces, alternatives or improvements in future versions. I am interested in your experience, in any capacity, of the ability to restore a selected company from a NAV .fbk file. Particularly on the SQL platform, this can be a slow and resource consuming task, and I know that alternatives have been made using SQL tooling. If you are running with the native database I also appreciate your input.
Please also feel free to post comments and experiences. Thanks all.
It's quite an interesting question. I am one of those people that still use FBKs occasionally. I don't use them as part of a disaster recovery process, but more for maintenance, especially shipping and building test/development environments. Its sometime annoying to have to build a 500gig database when I only need a small company to do some testing with.
In a Native environment often clients have a Playground company that is in the same database as the live company, because of the complexity or running multiple servers, and allocating cache drives etc. But in SQL its easy enough to just craete a new database.
I think that a company that has a very large database with many companies must also have a solid backup procedure that allows for backups of this size.
But where the real issue comes is for Business that have multiple separate companies that need to be managed separately. For example accounting companies or hosting companies. Where there is a logistical and actual requirement to separately backup each company. Also some companies with SOX requirements would need that ability as well, so that they can keep data separated. Though logically one would expect them to have the data in separate SQL databases.
soo...
yes I think this is a feature that is needed, but priority wise its not at the top of the list.
FYI top of MY list is fixing SELECT * as I mentioned in this blog: [:'(]
http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/singleton/archive/2008/03/14/select-from-and-how-to-do-it-better-in-nav.aspx
David Singleton - MVP Dynamics NAV Dynamics NAV Consultant since 1991 Available for Navision system performance design and tuning.Dynamics Book
It would be REALLY nice to have an easy-to-use way to pull a SQL Server backup per company. That would certainly make a difference. Not so much for end users, they put in place full backup/recovery procedures anyway, and they are usually able to put the infrastructure together to handle all of that. For me as a developer it would be nice to have the ability to pull one of the smaller companies out without intruding too much on the customer's processing.
Daniel RimmelzwaanRIS Plus LLCMicrosoft Dynamics NAV - MVP
DenSter: It would be REALLY nice to have an easy-to-use way to pull a SQL Server backup per company. That would certainly make a difference. Not so much for end users, they put in place full backup/recovery procedures anyway, and they are usually able to put the infrastructure together to handle all of that. For me as a developer it would be nice to have the ability to pull one of the smaller companies out without intruding too much on the customer's processing.
It would be great if the "Create Company" feature allowed you to specify a filegroup for each company. The company-specific table would be placed there. This would allow you to isolate each company or just put them all in the same filegroup. You could backup individual filegroups. Larger companies could be placed on separate disk systems. Of course, this would mean that the "Object Designer" would need to create tables in the correct filegroups.
For backing up a single company, it is really needed.
And I give an extra reason:
Some months ago, I noticed that the SQL-backup didn't run for some time ( AARRGGHH!). I warned them, started the SQL-backup but always got some error. Then I started a backup directly on the server (without the job) and it completely hung the server! The only thing that worked was tugging out the powercable!!!
I directly tried a NAV-backup and to my relief it DIDN't give an error. I directly created a new DB, restored the backup in it, did some checks and luckily all was ok. I don't know how I would have done that WITHOUT the NAV-backup! Actually, I know, but not in so a short time...
kriki:And I give an extra reason:
Hmm I think one of us missinterpreted the question. I guess you interpereted it as "can we remove the NAV FBK functionality".
I read it as "Should we add something similar to the FBK abilty to backup and restore a single company into some SQL functionality."
Dean could you clarify. I hope you are not planning to kill the FBK functionality.
I use this functionally a lot in may daily work. Please don't kill this functionality and extend it to SQL
Nuno Maia
David Singleton: kriki:And I give an extra reason: Hmm I think one of us missinterpreted the question. I guess you interpereted it as "can we remove the NAV FBK functionality". I read it as "Should we add something similar to the FBK abilty to backup and restore a single company into some SQL functionality." Dean could you clarify. I hope you are not planning to kill the FBK functionality.
Hmmm. I hope I am missinterpreting it!
But I would really like the companybackup as fast as a SQL-backup and without blocking other users (or being blocked) by other users.
Thanks for all the input so far.
The question is not based on removing any functionality available currently, but rather to assess the importance of company-specific backup/restore, since this is an area that SQL Server cannot help with out of the box. The File Group idea is certainly one way to look at this, as is the support of a server side component that can perform a 'company copy'.
There might be several solutions; but I wanted to get a feel for how much it is used today.
It's a bit of a trick question though. On SQL Server you will not find many people that use it because NAV backups are so slow compared to SQL Server backups. The time it takes to pull one company NAV backup you can backup AND restore an entire SQL Server database, and from there you can go in and delete the companies you don't need. So if you find that not a lot of people use it, in many cases it's not because they wouldn't want to, it just takes too much time.
I would submit that if this were available in SQL Server, it would be used a lot. When all customers were on Classic, they would use this feature all the time.
Dean McCrae:The question is not based on removing any functionality available currently, but rather to assess the importance of company-specific backup/restore
Great, that's how I interpreted your original post.
I think that for Company backup to make sense, you need to consider the following:
I really like Babrown's idea with file groups, that would make administration much easier, but of course that wont address all the specif issues mentioned above.
Also Daniels point is very vallid, though I never really thought about it. These days I tend to put companies in seperat databases to aviod having to do a NAV company backup, so if you can do what you are suggesting, then I agree that a lot more people would use it.
PS off topic but will you be at Convergence? If so it would be great to meet up.
Daniel, you're right about the NAV company restore problems being a reason to choose alternative means; I expected point number 3 to be more common therefore but I expect there are several ways around it, including the one you pointed out. If it's important enough the means usually present themselves I agree that it does not lessen the need for the feature.
David, these are good points - a nice spec. All company sensitive data in system tables and 'global' tables would absolutely need to be included.
I plan to be at Convergence for a morning or afternoon - not sure which day yet but will know on Monday. Will let you know.
Thanks guys!
Dean McCrae:I plan to be at Convergence for a morning or afternoon - not sure which day yet but will know on Monday. Will let you know
We have a lunch on Thursday, maybe you could ask Kipper for an invite to that. I feel you would be very welcome.
Thanks to all for taking this poll and contributing opinions.
In 6.0 SP1 the Company Restore performance against the SQL version of NAV will be much improved; there will no longer be internal tables created and deleted unnecessarily for all companies that already exist in the database.
As a rough guide on typical desktop hardware, restoring into a database with 20 companies (on a single box) is reduced from around 30 minutes to 3 minutes. Better improvements are likely with more companies, and going machine-machine.
It is also planned to make this available as a 5.0 update, but I cannot currently say when that will be.
Awesome Dean, thanks for the heads up