Upgrade only some companies

Djou2424

Now that we can't backup/restore only a few companies, is there a way to do an upgrade for some of the companies at one point and do the rest at a later date?

We have a client that we are upgrading to 2013R2 that has 133 companies.
We would like to be able to split the upgrade over 2 or 3 week-ends, doing half or a third of the company at a time.
Is it possible?

Alex_Chow

You can only do this as a separate database. Not on the same database.

davmac1

Have you considered turning this into a multi tenant solution?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn271673(v=nav.71).aspx

This is one area where a multi tenant solution could be useful - multiple company databases with one application database.

"Tenants and Companies

When you have upgraded your application and the data, you have a database that has the same number of companies as you had before the upgrade. In Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2, this database is considered a tenant. This does not mean that you have to turn your solution into a multitenant deployment. But it means that you can if you want to.

For example, your Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployment in the earlier version consisted of a database that has 20 companies. In other words, you support 20 companies that all share the same application functionality. In this example, the companies are separate companies that have nothing to do with each other except that they are supported by you in one database. In Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2, you can choose to extract the application-wide tables into a separate database and keep the data for all 20 companies in the original database. This becomes a single-tenant business data database. Then, you can choose to split the business data database into one for each company so that you run a truly multitenant environment. The application is stored separately in the application database, and you maintain application functionality centrally. When you modify the application, you make the changes available to one tenant at a time. As a result, if something goes wrong, all other tenants are not affected.

Compare this to earlier versions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV where a database could contain several companies. These companies could be related or not, but they would all use the same application and write to the same database. Also, when you modified the application, it would affect all companies immediately. So if something went wrong, all companies would be affected."

Djou2424

The database has 133 companies, and they are all related with each other.
When we deploy a modification, we have to do it for every company at the same time.

The reasons why I ask the question are:
- Split the upgrade over 2 week-ends to reduce the down time for the employes
- So far we have been unable to upgrade from 2013 to 2013R2. Upgrading from 2009 to 2013 went fine, but we are getting some unexpected sql errors when we upgrade from 2013 to 2013R2. We are able to upgrade if we only keep a couples of companies in the database (we've tried 2, 10 and 15). So splitting the upgrade in multiple phases, a few companies at a time could have been a work around.

davmac1

This is what the multi tenant structure does.
You have one set of application code applied to all the databases.
You end up with a more manageable SQL Server because you have 133 companies spread out among multiple databases.

You should be able to split your companies in the old version into different databases, then upgrade them and merge them into your multi tenant solution - one common codebase for all 133 companies.

Djou2424

But if we split them into multiple databases, this mean that if they have external software that read data from the SQL tables, those software will need to be modified as well to go read the data in different databases based on the companies they need the data from?

Same with customization that was done to go write data in multiple companies from 1 company.

I will go read more about multi-tenants but I doubt this is something that would be useful for that client.

Alex_Chow

You can't go into multi-tenant solution until you upgrade to NAV2013 R2 first.

In order to do that, the only way he can do this is by having a old database and NAV2013R2 database and upgrade one company at a time.