With more and more focus on cloud computing and cloud services, I have been asked several times about the possibility of using Dynamics NAV with SQL Server Azure. So I decided to write this blog entry to help "shed some light" on the topic. What is SQL Server Azure you ask? SQL Server Azure is the cloud version of Microsoft SQL Server. The difference is that it's a cloud database running in Microsoft datacenters around the globe. High-availability and fault tolerance are built in. ...

I have recently come across an issue with a large Dynamics NAV customer where queries that normally ran VERY quickly became slower and slower over time and blocking was increased significantly. After going through the normal troubleshooting activities there seemed to be no easily explainable cause for the degraded performance. Essentially we were seeing queries that normally should take just a handful of milliseconds were suddenly taking hundreds of milliseconds to complete, causing increased blocking...

Solution developers will often have different versions of Dynamics NAV installed on a single machine for their development environment. The way this is often implemented is to fully install the latest version and simply copy the Classic Client binary files for earlier versions into separate folders so you have something like this: NAV 2009 R2 fully installed with an R2 SQL Server database C:\NAVCLIENTS\NAV 40 SP3\ClassicClient (containing NAV binary files. A NAV 4.0 SP3 database is also accessible...

In Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 we have new feature named " Defining the Time Zone for Web Services ". You can read about it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg502505.aspx . The same feature exists in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 SP1 since build 31926 with KB 2443436. However we have few support requests when NAV developers or users don't know about this feature availability or don't know how to use it. I will try to describe in samples what results we have with different...

With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2, you can configure Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server to specify the time zone in which web services calls are run. You do this by configuring the WebServicesDefaultTimeZone setting in CustomSettings.config file, the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server configuration file. The following table describes the possible values for the WebServicesDefaultTimeZone setting. Value Description UTC Specifies that all business logic for web services on the server runs in...