Reporting Services and NAV

KenT

Hi everyone, as you can see from my post count, I'm new to this community.

I've been introduced to Navision not so long ago, and wish to enhance my experience in working with it. At the moment, I don't have much skills on working with the detailed aspects of NAV, but I understand the gist of the functionalities and most of the business processes.
It's the latter that I'm fairly inexperienced in... Development skills are nil, but I'm working on that

It's been suggested to me that reporting services (included in MS SQL server 2005) could make a drastic improvement in relieving some stress on Navision as it processes reports. What are your thoughts on this?
How is the connection established between Navision and the reporting services functionalities? Ie: How can Navision communicate with Reporting services?
I suppose I can test this by setting up a VPC sandbox to play around with.

On a related note, please go easy on me and cope with me when explaining things. I'm not quite familiar with all the technical slang and abbreviations...

jannestig

Do you have access to partner source or searched through mibuso ?

You will find a lot of your questions answered in various forums with mibuso and whitepapers released from MS, most of these can be found in PS or here on mibuso.

KenT

jannestig wrote:

Do you have access to partner source or searched through mibuso ?

You will find a lot of your questions answered in various forums with mibuso and whitepapers released from MS, most of these can be found in PS or here on mibuso.

Yes, I have access to PartnerSource, and did a search on mibuso, like a good little newblet.
However, for a novice such as myself, all the information is a little overwhelming, not to mention that I don't know where to start with all these resources. For example, I know that Navision can be run on both the Navision Application Server and MS SQL server, but I've come across several posts that dealt with "NAS". It didn't dawn on me until just now that NAS = Navision Application server.
Hence me posting amongst the community, I was hoping some of you had some interesting ideas or answers to my questions?
It's not that I'm lazy, just a little lost here.

p.willemse6

Ken, you can't run NAV on a NAS. A NAs is a way to communicate with external app's, you can see it as a client without an interface. You can run NAV on SQL, or on C-Side, the native database of NAV...

matttrax

Yeah, pretend like Navision is just an interface for the database. Reporting services would plug into the database just like any other SQL database.

jannestig

Hej Kent

I was meaning to be condecending, but merely like any assignment its always good to do the research before trying to jump into the problem,

The easiest way to think of NAV like the others have said is an old star network the SQL is the HUB and all the other modules etc make up the stars, of course the hub can get overloaded by to many stars as well,
Has anyone tried using the new MS PERFORMANCE server on a NAV DB yet?
Depending upon what you expect reporting services to do yes it could free up a lot of processing time and power, you may wish to look in fact at setting up a replication server to do all your reporting on, this is pretty common approach and something we always had when i worked with PEOPLESOFT then we had 5 replication servers based on a 40000 user syste, IT was a uni,

I supposed to next answer your question you should tell us what you are expecting reporting services to do for you other then free up processing on the DB

KenT

I didn't take your reply as condescending, no worries jannestig.
Perhaps my statement as "NAV running on NAS/MS SQL" was put wrongly. I suppose I should rephrase it to, "NAV communicates with NAS/ MS SQL for databases"?

As for research, I completely agree, but with nothing start, and not being sure where to start, I came here.

It would just be nice to know if people have had any experiences with reporting services and perhaps give a heads up about problems and such?

kriki

[Topic moved from Navision forum to SQL General forum]

RobinS

Hi. Robert Miller is giving a webinar on NAV and SQL Reporting Services for the NAV Users Group on 1/31/08 at 2:00 p.m. EST. If you're interested, you can register at http://www.navug.com/. Thanks.

jannestig

to be honest before 5.1 technical upgrade MS gav our client an SQL expert he apparently was unaware of sql changes vis a vis striping, so back in the day shite happend