Let’s continue where we left off in my previous post about Job Inventory. In that post, I’ve tried to explain that when you purchase something for a specific Job in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central the inventory is always corrected to zero unless you post your transaction via the Item Journal. In the last few major releases Microsoft made a lot of improvements to the integration with the Job Module and the rest of Business Central. Let’s review two of these improvements and then explain the “problem” that these improvements have created and (spoiler alert) how to fix this problem. Impro ..read more

Last week I promised to blog about something less nerdy, something functional. Let’s see if I can keep that promise. Since September last year I’ve had the honour of working on an upgrade project as functional/strategic consultant. The customer is upgrading from Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 to Business Central running in the cloud. The NAV 2017 system is customized and there is an ISV solution that does not exist in AppSource. The goal of the project is to migrate to Business Central with no customizations, only running with apps from AppSource. From a business perspective, Jobs are the center ..read more

Last year I wrote a few blog posts about how Business Central uses MARS to control datareads between SQL Server, the middle tier and the front-end. Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) causing locks on SQL Server I wrote these posts as a promise for a customer to raise awareness for the problem with Microsoft. I also discussed the issue on Yammer. Surprise! Look what is in 2023 Wave 1 The MARS issues almost always result from the locking behavior we inherited from the old Navision days when we had Table-Locking which means that once the table has been modified during a transaction each re ..read more

Talent can be a blessing and a curse. Or… as Johan Cruijff said: “every disadvantage has its advantage”. “every disadvantage has its advantage” Johan Cruijff For as long as I can remember my talent has been making sure performance problems are fixed. I already did that in the days with Navision and it’s Native Database and later with Dynamics NAV on SQL Server. With Business Central running in the cloud, performance problems don’t just magically disappear. Azure SQL can easily scale up and down allowing you to postpone performance tuning just a bit but eventually when your system get’s bigger ..read more

I have not been blogging a whole lot lately, it’s been a bit quiet here. This is not because there is nothing to blog about but more about work-life balance. In the last few weeks I have been communicating a bit with recruiters. I am looking for a new project somewhere in the September timeframe and I decided to change the setting for my LinkedIn profile to let recruiters know I am open to work. To be perfectly honest, I have never actually done a project via a recruiter. Never in the almost 17 years of freelancing. It has always been word-of-mouth that led me from one project to the next. It ..read more

You have probably heard of the Women in Dynamics initiative that launched last year at Directions EMEA. Roughly a year ago and roughly around the same time I started my transition. When my brother and I were driving to BCTechDays together last Thursday I was wondering in my head if they would be represented at this event too. After we arrived at the event and watched the crowd I quickly realized that this must not be the case. This is a male-only event with hamburgers and beer. You could smell the testosterone going around. My guess would be that less than 5 percent of the attendees was female ..read more

This is a continued blog from the one I wrote earlier today about Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) causing locks on SQL Server. In this blog I will show what happens on SQL Server if you keep result sets open during long transactions and we will discuss a possible workaround that I need your feedback on. How to reproduce this? Together with the project team we’ve reproduced this issue on the latest versions of Business Central, also with a relatively small database. The examples shown in this blog are from a Business Central 14 system running on a SQL Azure database scaled as General Pu ..read more

It has been a while since my last blog. I’ve been a little pre-occupied by my personal situation. But, the good news is that work continues as usual and it remains interesting enough to share experiences from. This blog post is about the performance of Business Central on SQL Server. It seems that this subject continues to be connected to me. I tried for a while to shake it off but decided to just give up and let the interesting projects happen. This for sure is an interesting project. The problem that I am going to describe in this blog can happen to anyone, and it probably does, but only in ..read more

Initially you will most likely use KQL for ad-hoc analysis if a customer calls you in panic that a system is slow. But it is much better to use the telemetry to prevent issues and predict that systems get slower and fix issues before users get their eyes all wet. For this it is important to be able to do comparisons, and in most businesses you can compare business days (monday vs. tuesday) or weekdays (this monday vs. last monday) or hours (10am vs. 4pm). This morning I logged in to a customers system and compared the last 4 weeks per hour. You can immediately see that the system is not used ..read more

Time flies if you are having fun. It seems like yesterday that Luc van Vugt had published his first book about Automated Testing and recently the Second Edition has been released. Everyone in our community knows, or should know, that having the Automated Testing book from Luc is mandatory. Luc is the authority when it comes to this subject. But the question is, why should you buy this second edition? Well, because a lot has changed since the first version. And this book is twice as thick! Why has so much changed? Testing as such has not, so why is this book so much thicker and better than the ..read more