What to do when your Dynamics NAV Database is too big?

Austral Dynamics gets support calls from our customers asking about archiving their historical data. With the decrease in storage cost and an increase in its performance and capacity, such questions are very rare but do come up once in a very long while.

We recommend companies to remove the data that adds no value first before trying out anything extreme. A ton of storage in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV database can be consumed by holding such unwanted data.

Dynamics NAV has been helping clients since 1996 and many customers have kept that data with them throughout these years. While some find it necessary to archive old data, others believe trying to manage a 700 GB database backup is a hassle and very time-consuming.

Austral Dynamics has a couple of ways to “shrink” the size of your database by removing some of the data using Dynamics NAV. The data compression processes will combine multiple entries in the table as a single entry. But the data compression process takes a very long time to run. This process requires the companies to run it periodically when using NAV instead of running it with a database of 700GB.

Our Dynamics NAV consultants avoid recommending our customers to use Data Compression because the prior versions of Navision can cause data problems if you try to upgrade it.

We recommend removing data that adds no value or has low priority value. The historical data you may have has no regulatory compliance and is not important to running the business.

Some examples of the tables that might carry unimportant data are:

• Change Log

• Sales Document Archive

• Purchase Document Archive

• E.D.I. Receive Documents

• E.D.I. Send Document

• Posted Sales/Purchase Documents

• Posted Warehouse Documents

• Warehouse Registered Documents

• Any posted documents

This does not mean that you delete everything in these tables but certainly delete data that is not required by the tax or audit authorities.

The other way is reimplementation in which you can start fresh in a new Dynamics NAV database comprising of your setup data, master data, and opening balances. Companies that have been using Dynamics NAV for a long time usually opt for this method as it gives an opportunity to eliminate a lot of unwanted data and unwanted modifications.

For more assistance, don’t forget to call us at 02 9763 2040 or visit http://www.australdynamics.com