Do not update AX database tables from SQL
This requirement keeps popping up on the Community Forums by people who are not familiar of how Microsoft Dynamics AX works, typically for third-party integration, data warehousing and reporting scenarios. In this post I would like to give some insights on why is it not recommended to update AX database tables from SQL.
Record identifiers
Each row in Microsoft Dynamics AX database within Microsoft SQL Server has a unique identifier which is by default the primary/surrogate key as well for the records. The field is called RecId, and it is maintained as an incremental, int64-based positive or negative number. The highest number I was able to allocate is 3 below the maximum value of a 64-bit integer, which was 9,223,372,036,854,775,805 and you would get an error for the next value:
If you would ever reach the maximum value, the manual fix is to set the next value to be -9,223,372,036,854,775,807.
