Microsoft Dynamics NAV and SQL Server

Over the past few years, Microsoft Dynamics NAV on SQL Server has become kind of a hot topic. Many NAV users are moving their NAV database to SQL Server, and find out that the application does not always perform as well as expected. Rimmelzwaan Implementation Services provides the following services:

• Hardware Healthcheck. We can look at your hardware and see if there are no obvious painpoints, compared to the best practices for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Together with your hardware specialists we can assess whether your hardware may be one of the causes of your performance problems.
• NAV Key and Index Tuning. By default, all keys in a NAV database are created as indexes on SQL Server. Not all of them are necessary to perform well. In fact, many of those indexes actually add to performance problems. We can analyze the key usage in your database and enhance the performance of the indexes for SQL Server.
• SIFT (or Sum Index Flowfield Technology) is used by NAV for storing calculated values. SIFT values are stored on SQL Server in separate SIFT tables. Many of the values in those SIFT tables are never used, and maintaining them causes enormous overhead. We can analyze your system, reduce the SIFT overhead, and increase the performance of your application.
• NAV Code Review. Code review is the most time consuming of all performance enhancement activities, and is typically done after we've done a hardware healthcheck, tuned the indexes of your NAV database and eliminated redundant SIFT levels. We will look at the slowest performing processes and we will optimize the NAV code specifically with SQL Server performance in mind.

In addition to the design of your system, it is vitally important to maintain your NAV database on SQL Server. A proper maintenance plan will increase the performance of your NAV database. The maintenance plan should include jobs to delete empty SIFT records, to maintain the proper statistics, and to maintain properly configured indexes. We use the tools developed by SQL Perform Ltd. to set up the maintenance plan as well as help us analyze the system usage more quickly. As a certified SQL Perform consultant, we provide the following products and services:

• SQL Perform-Maintenance. Maintenance of your SQL Server database is critical for the health and performance of your NAV database. We install the SQL Perform Maintenance tools for you and we set up your maintenance plan.
• SQL Perform-Analysis. We use these tools to analyze the usage of your NAV database, including the usage and performance of the indexes, but also to look at wait statistics, locking and blocking in your system during daily usage.
• DBA Services. This is an extension of the SQL Perform tools, where we will enter into an agreement to periodically check your database. We check that the maintenance plans don't have any issues, and we can run the analysis routines periodically to keep track of any potential issues.