I am pleased to announce the release of the SQL Server Database Compression Analyzer for Dynamics. This tool was created to help Dynamics partners and customers leverage the benefits of SQL Server Data Compression and to make the processing of analyzing and implementing compression quicker and easier. I know there are several generic “Compression Tools” available on the web and I am sure they are all fine, but none of these tools take into account the design eccentricities of the Dynamics database, causing many of these tools to error out or not run at all and none of them have been extensively tested on all of the Dynamics products. The Dynamics Compression Analyzer was written to handle these eccentricities and has been extensively tested on all of the Dynamics Products; AX, NAV, CRM, GP, and SL. This tool will walk you through analyzing your index usage helping you make the decision of which indexes to compress and which indexes not to compress and what level of compression ROW or PAGE to use. Once you have analyzed the data and decided what to compress and how to compress, the tool will do the actual compression for you and let you know how much space you’ve have reclaimed.

You can get the Microsoft SQL Server Data Compression Tool for Dynamics here: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/MSSDCTD

Some of the Benefits of SQL Server Database Compression:

• Reduced storage requirements
• Increased performance
  • Data is loaded into cache (BufferPool) in a compressed state using less of the cache allowing for data to be cached. The more data cached, the less SQL has to go to disk, the faster the response times.
  • Data is read from the disk in a compressed state meaning it takes less physical IOs to read compressed data which puts less stress on the disk subsystem allowing it to handle more IO requests in a timely fashion.

NOTES:

• Compression is only available on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and later, Enterprise Edition or higher.
• Compression can increase overall CPU utilization on the SQL Server by 10 – 30% depending on what you compress and how you compress it. So if your CPUs are averaging 60 - 70% utilization without compression enabled you may not want to implement it as it could cause serious performance issues.
• If you like to engage assistance from Microsoft to implement compression for your Dynamics deployment, please contact mbsprosv@microsoft.com (billable server through Professional Services)

Known Issues with Compression Tool:

• The tool is not Partition Aware. This would require a significant rewrite of the code and may be added in the future.

Michael De Voe

Senior Premier Field Engineer

Microsoft Dynamics

Microsoft Certified Master - SQL Server 2008

What is silent or unattended installation
Simply said silent install is installation without any UI. In this case it’s about how to run “setup.exe” in silent mode. It’s recommended that you only run “setup.exe” when you install a new NAV installation, because the installer have been tested by them using this procedure only. So by that said it’s no longer supported to install from the different msi files directly. This is true for all NAV 2009 releases. The major problem you may run into if you are installing directly from the msi files is that you will not get prerequisites (as .Net, Report Viewer and so on) installed and you will also miss out one some pre installs checks (validating that you have everything needed as outlook).

How to-do it?
It’s very simple. “setup.exe” does support some different parameters for this purpose:
/quiet <– will turn of the UI
/log [filename] <– create a log text file in the specified location
/config [filename]<– point to the configuration file to use during the installation
/uninstall <– will simple un install the product
/repair <– repairs a bad installation

The first thing that needs to be done is to create the configuration file that we will use.

1. Star “setup.exe”
2. Click “next”
3. Click “I accept”
4. Click “Choose an installation option”
5. Click “Custom Components”
6. Select the product that you want to install
7. Update destination folder if needed by clicking on the “destination folder” link
8. Click “next”
9. Click on the component that you have picked to setup the different parameters as “server name” and so on. When done apply your changes.
10. Click “save configuration”
11. Pick a good location, name and save the xml file

You can create as many configuration files as you want for different purposes. Now, you can run the silent install by simply doing start -> run -> [setupExepath] /quiet /config [configfilepath.xml]. Be sure to take a look to the log file, to ensure everything went OK.

Example D:\setup.exe /quiet /config C:\configfiles\config1.xml /log C:\log.txt