Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 upgrade questions answered: Performance and licensing

We received some interesting questions from a reader in response to our recent Microsoft Dynamics NAV upgrade discussion. There are plenty of considerations around licensing and performance when planning an upgrade to NAV 2013, and to help answer these questions, we went back to the participants in our original discussion, Greg Kaupp of ArcherPoint and Andrew Good of Liberty Grove Software.

Accelerating upgrades

First, our reader wanted to know how to manage the performance of upgrade functions. Without modification, some of these functions would make the upgrade run longer than a weekend.

"Given that there is a lot of work to be done by the upgrade software on dimensions, how have you found the performance when going from NAV 5 to NAV 2013?"

Greg Kaupp: We've found it necessary in certain upgrade situations to rewrite some of the data migration functions found in the upgrade toolkit directly in SQL.  We haven't run into a scenario yet where that didn't do the trick and we were able to accomplish the upgrade in the time allotted.

Andrew Good: The process of going from 5.0 to 2013 involves have to upgrade to 6 first. Microsoft built the dimension upgrade tool using SQL Queries, this has worked well and been relatively quick.

Improving transaction loading times

On the topic of loading speed for inventory transactions, our reader wanted more details about how to achieve rates in the tens of thousands per minute.  Were these speeds for NAV 2013? Did it include posting the transactions? What technology did this use?

GK: To significantly increase transaction volume ...