I attended the Convergence 2009 meeting in New Orleans last week. It was a little week for developers but the tech sessions that existed were good. I went to eh SQL Optimizing Performance session and Jesper and Peter did a great job, they just didn’t have enough time. Unfortunately I was unable to attend their interactive session because it was scheduled against the Web Services session (who make up these schedules :(). Anyway at the end of the session I was able to ask about the existence of anything in SQL2008 that is compelling for NAV vs a SQL 2005 install. The answer I got was yes and SQL 2008 was actually modified to accomodate requests from the NAV development team. That is all I got because of a lack of time.
Does anyone have any info or someplace I could go for more info on exactly what interactions between NAV 2009 and SQL 2008 have been added that are better than using SQL 2005>>>>
I really don’t know about whether things were added as a result of the NAV team asking for it. You’d think we’d have heard about that before if that were the case. When Windows Server 2008 was released I went to the launch event, and attended a SQL Server 2008 session. Some features I thought were useful in the context of any ERP system, I blogged about it here: http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/denster/archive/2008/04/21/sql-server-2008-wave.aspx.
In general, I would say that since 2008 is the current version, you should use that for new implementations. I’ll let other people chime in about whether there are any compelling reasons to upgrade if you are on 2005.
Well, I attended Jesper’s and Peter’s sessions - 1 x presentation, 2 x interactive - at Convergence EMEA 2008 (really cool!).
Daniel’s BLOG actually sums the benefits up, so I just like to add what IMHO especially for NAV could interessting:
SQL 2008 has highly improved OLTP (and OLAP) enigne; it generates basically better execution plan, causing less scans, consuming less system resources, thus processing faster
Row- and Page-Compression (Enterprise): this is especially frasible for large tables with data which isn’t modified much after creation, but read a lot: actually all kind of “Ledger Entries” in NAV. This compresses the data down to 30% of the original size, thus precious cache and disk space is released. (Have in mind that compression/decompression requises lot of CPU power)
Resource Gouvenor (Enterprise): e.g. assigning memory and CPU limits to an application. This would enablu us in NAV e.g. to assign certain resource thresholds to NAV clients and NAS; this it could be assured that a NAS gets sufficient resources, or to restrict clients, or vice versa.
Indexed Views (Enterprise): well, of course Indexes Views are available with “Standard” edition, too, but EE could use them a ot better, thus, all NAV versions running on VSIFT could benefit benefit from that.
All sorts of advanced security settings, policies, etc. could also help for “hardening” NAV
Those who are expanding the NAV application by using SQL site processing could benefit from the new datatypes, audition features or TSQL commands (e.g. the MERGE!).
Hence, I think SQL 2008 is generally quite an improvement, downside is that most of the cool stuff is “Enterprise” feature. For those who want to run “Standard” I think upgrading from 2005 to 2008 is not a “must have” then …