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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics AX (Archived) / Consolidate Data from ...
Microsoft Dynamics AX (Archived)

Consolidate Data from Separate Instances

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Posted on by Community Member

Hi, I am working on finding the potential solutions for this scenarios and hope someone here can help me: a company has offices in US, EU and ASIA, and each location runs their own AX systems which do not talk to each other. The company now want to track and report on the inventory status globally, so we need to find a solution to consolidate the inventory data from each system and somehow put them together so they can run report. The solutions I can think of are:

1. Use ETL tool (SSIS or others, any suggestion?) to extract data from all three database and put them together in a centralized data warehouse that is optimized for reporting. 

2. Similar to the first one, but instead of creating a data warehouse, just create SQL tables to store all the data.

Please share your thoughts on this and what could be the solutions? 

Thanks so much! 

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  • Verified answer
    Vilmos Kintera Profile Picture
    Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

    For idea 1 consider that you could have overlapping data like RecId, so you must also have the "company identifier" like DataAreaId in your unique keys on the newly designed consolidation table.

    As for data movement, consider using the Entity Store based on Data Import Export Framework (DIXF), which was invented exactly for such data warehouse/reporting scenarios.

    You could set it up in Azure SQL, and use 3 different entities for the 3 companies. Then on the Entity Store you could create a View which combines data from the 3 sources into a flat data for which you could run the reporting against.

    Here is my overview article about Entity Store in AX:

    https://www.daxrunbase.com/2017/06/07/working-with-entity-store-and-dixf-in-ax/

    I have not tested it for such enormous data volume though that you could have in inventory transactions, but it does depend on what you want to use it for. Just to push on-hand inventory (InventSum)?

  • Suggested answer
    Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    I suggest:

    -Create an external data base, which will contains consolidates data from three instances.

    -Expose all tables created in external database as an OData EndPoints.

    -Create the same batch per each instance, which send data for endpoints using OData protocol.

    These three steps are very simple to achieve.

  • Vilmos Kintera Profile Picture
    Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

    OData does exist in AX 2012 indeed (blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/.../odata-query-service), but why use that and create custom batch jobs, when Entity store and DIXF framework just does exactly that for you, with very minimal customization effort?

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    Hi Vilmos,

    Thank you for what you shared.

    It is really very interesting.

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    Thanks Vilmos, it is very helpful.

    A follow up question, what if client does not want to use Azure SQL, instead, they would like to keep everything on-premise, would your solution still be viable? If not, what is your suggestion for on-premise scenario?

  • Suggested answer
    Vilmos Kintera Profile Picture
    Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

    Entity store can utilize local SQL Server too, it is viable.

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    Hi Vilmos, the data will include all the inventory related records, on-hand, in transfer, in reserve, etc. Do you think there could be issue with high volume?

    And other than the solution you recommended which I really like, do you think there is any other viable solutions that can achieve the same goal? I am writing a document and would like to list all potential solutions.

    Thanks very much.

  • Verified answer
    Vilmos Kintera Profile Picture
    Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

    If you are talking about InventSum, that is not an overly large table.
    The other options involve accessing the database directly, or writing code for exposing data through AIF. Both of them are less convenient for various reasons (security, maintenance, documentation). Using a standard framework is always a better choice.
    Kindly mark helpful answers with the checkbox to resolve the thread.

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