Company Data Archive is a utility built specifically for Microsoft Dynamics® GP. It provides customers an easy way to move their historical data from a live company in Dynamics GP to an archive company. Archiving your data will reduce the size of your live company and improve performance while posting, running reports and SmartLists, performing file maintenance, etc.
Company Data Archive has been on the market for 15 years. We have over 400 installs of the product and have seen it used on a variety of database sizes. We have customers using it with 1-2 gigabytes of total data and other customers using it with over 500 gigabytes of data.Why should you consider Company Data Archive? Here are the four main benefits:
- Streamline and declutter. By using Company Data Archive, users can streamline and declutter their inquiries and reports in GP. As we know, users can put date ranges on reports in GP, but they will still end up with historical, irrelevant data restricting them from viewing their useful data. Company Data Archive gets rid of that clutter and allows you to streamline reports and inquiry screens enabling users to make faster decisions.
- Increase performance. Hand-in-hand with decluttering data, users can increase performance in reports, look-ups, and inquiry windows in Dynamics GP. If SQL is scanning millions upon millions of rows from the temporary tables it generates, that process is going to take some time. However, by performing an archive and reducing a table with ~ 3 million rows to a few thousand, processing performance is then increased. Reports, look-ups, and inquiry windows are the 3 main areas users will see these performance improvements.
- Faster upgrading. Once you shrink your live database, upgrades will go much faster, allowing users to upgrade the historical data at a different time, at their leisure.
- Optimize disk space. As the database grows, and starts taking up a lot of disk space, it will take SQL longer and longer to run backup and restore processes. Company Data Archive will make your live company much smaller, taking up less disk space. Users can then move the archived company onto a different drive running on “less optimal” hardware, leaving the live company to “higher performing” hardware.
Professional Advantage will release 2 new versions of the archive tool.
One new offering called CDA 30, is a time limited license allowing users full access to archive data for 30 days. With 30 days of archiving, users can move as much data as they want with little upfront cost. This provides a cost effective way to archive one time or to test the waters of the product without making a full investment.
Also to release, Company Data Archive Plus (CDA +). The Plus version will allow customers to archive very large third-party modules including Project Accounting, Field Service, and Fixed Assets. These modules, along with other Microsoft ISV add-ons, are outside the scope of what we consider core GP. In past versions of CDA, the data in these tables was only available for transfer (copying). With CDA Plus, users can write a store procedure that would allow them to archive data from these table using the full CDA logic. Essentially we are providing an API into the CDA logic and the end user (or partner) would tell the program how their third-party tables interact with the core GP tables.
