Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Archives - Page 6 of 8

Dynamics 365 Dubai Summit 2020

With only 1 week left until the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Dubai Summit 2020, I would like to remind you that there are still a couple of sets available for this amazing, free event.

Dubai Summit 2020 website link

This is one of the largest conference in the region dedicated to Dynamics 365 with 5 tracks available in: Finance and Operations, Customer Engagement, Retail, Unified Operations and Power Platform.

It falls in line with the Dynamics 365 Saturdays event series, which has a goal of sharing the latest and greatest about our ERP platform and connected technologies freely. You can find more details at https://www.365portal.org/.

The Dubai Summit conference is a 365 Saturday on steroids and will be span across 3 days, 700 participants, with 29th of February being dedicated for various in-depth sessions held by fellow professionals and enthusiasts from Microsoft, Customers and Partners. Sunday will be a Power Platform bootcamp, and Monday will be a CDS core exam cram.

I will be presenting 2 sessions about the journey of moving the AX 2012 R3 implementation of JJ Food Services into the cloud. It will cover business and technical aspects and challenges of getting a large-scale enterprise system up and running within Azure.

Hope to see you all soon at the Dynamics 365 Dubai Summit on 29th of February!

By DAXRunBase|2020-02-21T10:48:51+01:00February 21st, 2020|Categories: Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, MSDyn365FO|Tags: #MSDyn365FO, conference, Dubai Summit, Dynamics 365, speaker|0 Comments

Trace database cleanup in an efficient way

The Trace parser is an excellent tool for troubleshooting business functionality within Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. Your Trace database can quickly grow large and it does affect the tools’ performance adversely.

Removing the old trace collections one-by-one is time consuming. You could utilize a stored procedure for cleaning up your AX trace database efficiently in SQL:

-- Replace AXTrace with your database name
USE [AXTrace]
GO
 
-- Truncate transaction log to reduce size
DBCC SHRINKFILE (N'AXTrace_log' , 0, TRUNCATEONLY)
GO
 
-- Iterate through the list of traces in the database
DECLARE cur CURSOR FOR 
       SELECT [TraceId] FROM [dbo].[Traces]
 
DECLARE @Id AS int
 
OPEN cur;
FETCH NEXT FROM cur into @Id;
 
-- Remove all traces in the database with the DeleteTrace stored procedure
WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS = 0)
BEGIN
       EXEC [dbo].[DeleteTrace] @TraceId = @Id
       FETCH NEXT FROM cur into @Id;
END
 
CLOSE cur;
DEALLOCATE cur;
 
-- Truncate transaction log to reduce size
DBCC SHRINKFILE (N'AXTrace_log' , 0, TRUNCATEONLY)
GO

By DAXRunBase|2020-03-23T13:21:53+01:00March 31st, 2019|Categories: AX 2012, Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations|Tags: AX 2012, cleanup, database, SQL, trace|0 Comments

Checklist can change AX configuration keys

The other day we ran into a serious issue during our regular Production system maintenance. The Data dictionary synchronization step has started creating indexes with a DEL_ prefix on large tables such as InventTrans. We have quickly identified that AX configuration keys got changed by opening a checklist.

It turned out that some of the users had the System_Checklist security privilege assigned, and they have clicked it by accident. Standard code can add or update License configuration keys when you run the checklist.

In our case only a couple of new entries were activated, such as SysObsoleteObjects60. It has added a lot of DEL_ objects which could be easily rolled back. At another company it has done irreversible damage for inventory dimensions. You could imagine how bad the situation could get if important config keys are turned off. Synchronization would start dropping columns and entire tables.

The quick fix was to use the Export functionality on the License configuration form from our Quality Assurance AX (daily copy of Production). Then we could import the correct configurations to Prod and revert changes by doing a Data dictionary synchronization.

Please ensure that your users only have access to security privileges they really need, to avoid unintentional damage. Remove the System_Checklist and similar features from everyone, except the administrators.

By DAXRunBase|2019-03-31T11:32:46+02:00March 31st, 2019|Categories: AX 2012, Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations|Tags: #MSDyn365FO, AX 2012, dictionary, synchronize|0 Comments

Synchronize Models between workspaces in MSDyn365FO

For our upgrade project we have decided to create 4 packages/models to start with, which is enough to separate larger areas. Once the models have been created on my VM, I had to make it available for everyone. The goal was to synchronize models between workspaces of other developers.

Package / Model	Description
JAD Core	Core application framework changes, essentially what is in Platform and Foundation
JAD Operation	Business application customizations, later on we might create additional models for larger functionality
JAD Integration	For exchanging
JAD Reporting	For reporting, data warehousing, CDS and entities

The devil lies in the details and for some reason the model was not showing up after synch. It turns out that the model description sits in an XML file within the Descriptor folder. You need to manually include it in source control, as explained in the documentation as well. Once it is checked in, all you need to do to synchronize models between workspaces is to get latest changes, then click on Dynamics 365 > Model Management > Refresh models.

By DAXRunBase|2018-10-18T09:48:24+02:00October 18th, 2018|Categories: Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, MSDyn365FO|Tags: #MSDyn365FO, AX 7, AX 8, Azure DevOps, D365FO, Descriptor, Dynamics 365, synchronize, VSTS|0 Comments

Developer VM performance for MSDyn365FO

When you are used to snappy desktops or locally hosted virtual machines and suddenly you need to move to the cloud, you would expect to see similar capabilities for a reasonable price. Unfortunately that was not my experience when it comes to deploying AX 8.1 in Azure cloud. This post is about setting expectations straight for MSDyn365FO developer VM performance hosted in the cloud vs. locally.

First of all, when you deploy your developer VM on the cloud, you have two options. Standard and Premium, which is a reference to what kind of storage will be allocated to your machine. The default size is D13 (8 cores, 56 GB RAM) for regular rotating hard disks, and you need to use the DS-prefixed computers for the flash storage with memory-optimized compute. You can read up about them on these pages in more detail on the Microsoft Docs site:

Premium disk tiers
Virtual machine sizing

When it comes to premium performance, the Virtual Machine template that Microsoft has built for the LifeCycle Services deployment is using the following structure:

Purpose	Tier	IOPS	Throughput
Operating System	P10	500	25 MB/sec (50K reads)
Services and Data	P20	2300	150 MB/sec (64K reads)
Temporary Build	P10	500	25 MB/sec (50K reads)

(more…)

By DAXRunBase|2018-10-15T13:00:43+02:00October 15th, 2018|Categories: Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, MSDyn365FO|Tags: #MSDyn365FO, Azure, benchmark, D365FO, Dynamics 365, HDD, performance, SSD, storage, VHD, VM|0 Comments