Blog - Page 15 of 20

24 02, 2016

Technical Conference Day 1

By DAXRunBase|2016-02-25T07:26:31+01:00February 24th, 2016|Categories: AX 7|Tags: AX 7, Technical conference|2 Comments

Just a day before kicking off the Microsoft Dynamics AX Technical Conference AX 7 has matured to RTW stage and has finally been shipped. During the Keynote session Dan Brown and Sri Srinivasan has revealed a couple of interesting topics, which later on will get expanded in the various breakout session.

Here is a quick re-cap for Day 1 for the sessions I have been able to attend:

Business Process Transformation and Business Process Platform are now the key phrases to memorize when we want to summarize what the changes are about for AX 7, where Azure cloud is acting as Platform as a Service (PaaS) to host the whole VM package including SQL Server
AX will not just be an ERP, but will be the foundation core of many components within the Microsoft stack, eventually becoming a Software as a Service (SaaS) model with modules being sealed and becoming more stand-alone
A continuous release- and hotfix model will be used from now on, with having an Update 1 and Update 2 package released later in 2016
The User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are now very customizable which are referred as Workspaces and Personas for a 360-degree view of individual business areas and processes, where the user can create and arrange their frequently used areas as Tiles, Tabs and Lists (grids) either in their own workspace, or on the standard dashboard
Global search functionality is available to find data, or specific AX functionality within the current screen context
The UI has a responsive design which resizes automatically to the available window space and even utilizes zooming within the browser window
Help is pulling context-sensitive, relevant information from the Wiki page and Knowledgebase
AX Entity Store will be a new technology which provides a better interface for external connectivity, i.e. PowerBI can feed from this source where we could use natural language queries to pull data back and render it on a dynamically filtered chart
The LifeCycle Services Business Process Modeler (BPM) has been considerably extended functionality-wise. We can now attach a Task guide created by the Task recorder tool against a BPM node. Also Visual Studio is able to integrate and attach development projects against a specific Business Process, to structure coding more intelligently
The Task guide can be exported into an XML file, which we could use to generate a Test script code in Visual Studio utilizing the SysTest framework with automatically generating the test case for a developer. If we include that in a Version Control check-in, the Build process will automatically pick it up and run the test case against the modified codebase and flag up the success or failure within the build log according to the outcome
Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is now the foundation for tracking development progress, and utilizes many of the additional features through LCS, for example Gated check-ins and Code review features with shelvesets

Very exciting changes and improvements indeed. Tune in for more later today in the Technical Conference Day 2 article.

17 02, 2016

Enable batch e-mail alerts from code

By DAXRunBase|2016-02-17T16:03:08+01:00February 17th, 2016|Categories: AX 2012|Tags: alerts, AX 2012, batch, job, X++|1 Comment

The setup of notifications for batch jobs are quite simple if you know where to look. To enable batch e-mail alerts from code all you need to do is create new records under \\Tables\BatchJobAlerts with the right flags for an AX user, who has their e-mail address set in the User Options correctly.

The following X++ Job is self-explanatory on how to enable batch e-mail alerts from code in case of Cancellation or an Error:

static void WIK_enableBatchJobAlerts(Args _args)
{
    #Batch
    Map             alertsMap;
    Map             alertsEntity;
    BatchJob        batchJob;
    BatchJobAlerts  batchJobAlerts;
    
    while select batchJob
        where (batchJob.Status      == BatchStatus::Executing
            || batchJob.Status      == BatchStatus::Waiting)
            // Optional filtering for dedicated batch service account only
            && batchJob.createdBy   == 'axbatchuserid'
        notexists join batchJobAlerts
            where  batchJobAlerts.BatchJobId    == batchJob.RecId
                // Include all batch jobs where e-mail alert is disabled for our account
                && batchJobAlerts.UserId        == batchJob.createdBy
                && batchJobAlerts.Email         == NoYes::Yes
    {
        // This can be called any number of times to alert multiple users even with different settings
        alertsMap = BatchJobAlerts::addAlertsToMap(
            batchJob.createdBy, // Whom to alert
            NoYes::No,          // Ended
            NoYes::Yes,         // Error
            NoYes::Yes,         // Canceled
            NoYes::No,          // Popup
            NoYes::Yes          // E-mail
            );
        
        BatchJobAlerts::saveAlerts(batchJob.RecId, alertsMap);
        
        alertsEntity = alertsMap.lookup(batchJob.createdBy);
        
        info(strFmt('Enabling alert (Ended=%1 Error=%2 Canceled=%3 Popup=%4 E-mail=%5) for user <%6> and batch <%7>',
            enum2Symbol(enumNum(NoYes), alertsEntity.lookup(#batchJobEnded)),
            enum2Symbol(enumNum(NoYes), alertsEntity.lookup(#batchJobError)),
            enum2Symbol(enumNum(NoYes), alertsEntity.lookup(#batchJobCanceled)),
            enum2Symbol(enumNum(NoYes), alertsEntity.lookup(#popup)),
            enum2Symbol(enumNum(NoYes), alertsEntity.lookup(#email)),
            batchJob.createdBy,
            batchJob.Caption
            ));
    }
}

The output will be something like this:

Enabling alert (Ended=No Error=Yes Canceled=Yes Popup=No E-mail=Yes) for user <sa.axbat> and batch <ADMIN – Due date alerts – every 15m>

5 02, 2016

AX 7 Technical Conference and Virtual Launch Event

By DAXRunBase|2016-02-05T17:54:58+01:00February 5th, 2016|Categories: AX 7|Tags: AX 7, Technical conference|1 Comment

We are approaching two important dates within the next couple of weeks to introduce the new major version, namely the AX 7 Technical Conference and Virtual Launch Event for the actual release highlights. Project Rainier is now stepping out from behind the curtains to reveal a new era of what an ERP system of the future looks like, bringing a lot of new technologies to the table, while building on the existing functionality of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 CU9.

The Virtual Launch Event will not probably reveal too many additional details on top of what we have already learned at Convergence and various early release channels, but could be interesting to see how the first customers are using it as their current Production environment.

On a side note keep in mind that wave 1 is only for new implementations, since there is no data conversion upgrade path yet for existing AX implementations. It will come second half of 2016, hopefully they will announce the wave 2 release date too.

Make sure you register for the launch event in time using the following link:
https://presentations.inxpo.com/Shows/microsoft/Dynamics/AX/Launch2016/Registration/Registration.html

Keep an eye out for the Technical conference app too, it should be downloadable soon. You do not want to miss any important break-out sessions whether your are doing a new implementation, or upgrading an existing one.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/techconference/Session-Catalog.aspx

See you in person in Seattle at the AX 7 Technical conference and at the Virtual Launch Event two weeks later!

8 01, 2016

Improve AX performace by fixing bad Query plans

By DAXRunBase|2016-01-08T17:57:45+01:00January 8th, 2016|Categories: AX 2012|Tags: AX 2012, cache, fix, kernel, query plan, SQL, tables, trace, X++|4 Comments

Sometimes the Purchase invoicing department has complained that posting took a very long time to complete. We could correlate this with the slow performing SQL statements alert explained in my previous post to identify the cause, now it is time to improve AX performace by fixing bad Query plans. My colleague, Peter Prokopecz provided some great insights on resolving this problem.

Either an AX trace, or the SQL alert could reveal the bad code. In our case it was the standard functionality of matching Tax transactions with the General journal entries, which can be found in \Data Dictionary\Tables\TaxTransGeneralJournalAccountEntry\Methods\create. It is a very large insert_recordset statement with multiple inner and exists joins:

(more…)

7 01, 2016

E-mail alerts for slow performing SQL statements in AX

By DAXRunBase|2016-08-16T11:09:44+02:00January 7th, 2016|Categories: AX 2012|Tags: alerts, AX 2012, e-mail, performance, SQL, statements|4 Comments

There are not that many tools to assist us in proactively monitoring our AX database health. I have created a set of SQL jobs that could generate e-mail alerts for slow performing SQL statements in AX to improve the system predictability.

If you are using DynamicsPerf already, it is very likely that the SQL Trace in the User options got already enabled to capture slow performing statements that take longer than 5 seconds, otherwise you could enable that yourself to start capturing data in SysTraceTableSQL in your AX database.

The information stored in the aforementioned table can be analyzed and aggregated to show what tables have been performing slow since the last execution of my job each day. I am also separating wildcard searches, since the LIKE statements mostly do not reuse query plans and you cannot improve their speed much further. It is however a must to keep an eye on the tables with high number of increments for possible outdated query plans, old statistics, missing indexes or poorly designed AX statements.

These are the requirements and steps for setting alerts for slow performing SQL statements in AX:

Enable SQL Trace with a sensible timeout for the AX users to be monitored.
Create a database where the daily aggregated slow performing statements and the Table name extracting function will be stored, in my sample code as [master].
Make sure there is an e-mail profile set up for sending the mails from under SQL Server Management Studio > SQL instance > Management > Database Mail, in my sample code as MYEXCHANGE.
Create a new SQL Server Agent Job and paste the attached statement as a Transact-SQL body. Make sure you replace the variables and values for the administration database ([master]), the target AX database (MyAXDB), mail profile (MYEXCHANGE) and destination e-mail address values.
Add a daily Recurring schedule to the Job to occur every 2 hours, or any interval to your liking below 24 hours
Run the job manually for the first time to create the table/function and pre-populate the records

Once the setup is successfully completed and a couple of slow statements gets recorded in the SysTraceTableSQL table in AX, the next scheduled run will pick up the values and send out the e-mail alert if you have done everything correctly.

WIK_SlowPerformingStatements_Job