• Legendary Strength of C/SIDE database - the history of Navision design reveals the primary goals to have its own proprietary database with the built-in features of database transaction integrity. As far as database is proprietary - Navision can manipulate its and tune it to serve its application. You can have users use the system heavily and suddenly shut down the power - when power is back on - Navision will be in the same good shap. The second goal was to provide robust graphical interface.
• What is the volume of your data? - Navision was originally targeting mid-size and large corporations. Now, however, Microsoft is trying to target it to large corporations with sophisticated manufacturing. In this case you could expect huge volume of data - Microsoft SQL Server is better positioned to deal with that.
• Do you have MS SQL Server Administrator? - Microsoft announces that MS SQL Server is moving to "zero-maintenance needed", but we would like to warn you - if you use Navision - you are more likely mid-size or large company. In this case you should have somebody to secure your database - in the case if you would like to deploy MSSQL Server
• Do you plan on Crystal Reports? - you can always deploy C/ODBC to enable your C/SIDE database for Crystal Report, but MS SQL Server has such nice features, as SQL Views and Stored Procedures, which make SQL Server preferable platform
• Do you need OLAP/Datawarehousing? - then SQL Server is the way to go. It has built in Analytical Server with OLAP cube creation and Excel data pivoting
• Do you plan to expose Navision data to other applications? - Navision has tools to expose the data from C/SIDE database (C/ODBC, C/FRONT), but in the case of SQL Server you certainly have standard Microsoft technologies in your disposition
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