Large Number of Transactions

Greetings All, I have been contacted by a prospective customer regarding Navision. This is a HUGE client in that they generate a lot of transactions. The client wants to maintain several of their current systems for customer billing, inventory control, etc. They want to take transactions generated by those systems and import them into Navision as a General Ledger Journal Entry. I’ve done similar projects before with great success. My concern with this prospect has to do with the number of transactions that they might possibly import. They are talking about 8 MILLION transactions per year! I don’t think that anyone in the USA has even been on Navision long enough to accumulate 8 million GL transactions so I’m posting this hoping to get some feedback from those of you in Europe. Do you think that Navision can handle this much transaction volume? Will the Financials database handle it or should we go with the MS-SQL option? I wasn’t sure in which forum to post this message. Since the client is wanting to integrate Navision with other systems, I chose this forum. Thanks for any help that might be offered! Regards, Mark. Mark Keener Automated Number Crunching Dayton, OH USA

We are currently preparing an upscaling for a client, which has decided to start charging the use of their web-based knowledge system. Estimated number of transactions that will be flowing into Navision is approx. 10 million per year. And you don’t want to know the complex set of business rules that needs to be handled. To name just one: incoming transactions can be for any of the 15 companies in the database… And the system is doing the full job, not only finance, but invoicing, stock control, etc. as well. For completeness; at this client a Financials system is running for 2,5 years already - very satisfactory. The system we specified to be used for the upscaling is Attain, running on SQL. Because of an extensive set of connections to other systems of this company (SAP, IBM AS/400, Commerce One, Oracle, etc.) SQL has the preference. Hardware will be of the BHM type (Big Hairy Monster), with multi-processors, plenty of RAM, fibre-linked fail-safe disk-arrays in a full redundant setup. Number of records isn’t the problem, SQL can handle these easily. Your database design and C/AL code needs to be carefully optimized for running SQL, though. Keywords at our project are scalability and buffering capacity. Buffering will be realized by having a BizTalk server as traffic agent for the transactions flow, and having a layer (number of rack PC’s) with multiple Navision Application Servers to keep processing separated from the main server. By putting the burden of checking validity (call it pre-processing) on the NAS level, the actual posting routine can be greatly simplified. John

Hi John, hi Mark, 8 millions transactions per year is not a problem. (200 working days, 8 hours a day, 3600 seconds per hour will be less than 1.4 transactions per minute; more than “do-able” ). I have handled a customer in 1998 who have had 1.2 million customer ledger entries per month (multiplied by 4 for G/L enties) so they have had 6 million entries per month. everthing on a native financials server (v1.3). Of course, the system was running for this “job” nearly 6 days, 24 hours per day (3 days twice a month during the weekends), but the user were still able to request data from the database. The difference between your projects an mine at that time is, that Navision itself was handling everything. No external communication was needed, except transferring data to the bank. John’s installation sounds interesting, especially having the BizTalk server envolved. Good luck, Mark. Kind regards Walter

hi,

i am anticipating the same issue. we have customized an integration facility for their RPRO POS that will generate 1.5 million lines/month, 50% of which are vendor entries.

it lessen the fear after reading your message. 8 million/month. my question, is there a way to ‘speed up’ the posting of this gen journal batch? how did you address this?

James what is the performance issue you are having, or is it just a concern that there might be an issue?