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Is there a purpose to the DAT company anymore?

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Posted on by kehlet

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When we developed Axapta back in the mid-90es in Denmark, we created the DAT company as a way for single-company entities to have a restricted usage of 1 vs. multiple companies. It was extension of the old XAL concepts (actually came from a product that retired under the name 'C4', really...)

But nowadays, what is the real purpose? There is no global data stored in there - it is instead stored in multiple companies (through Cross Company Data Sharing Policies) or in global tables (that don't have a dataAreaId field.

I'm probably only going to get speculations as it would require a MSFT engineer with insight into the company data structure (like MFP, for example - Michael, if you're reading this, by all means pitch in). But I'm really curious as to what it's even there for.

Customers find it confusing and I can't blame then.

Thoughts?

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Junaid Idrees on at

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Hi Jesper Kehlet,

I can take this as Start up company or base company and it is still used to reserve for common information like Fiscal Calendar, Main Account Categories,Financial Dimensions,Financial dimension set,Global Address book, User and group information.

I am just wondering to know what confusion is arising by DAT company and if it is really creating a confusion for business users then i suggest to hide it from security configuration/role framework with the help of Developer if needed.

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kehlet 462 on at

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Actually, the Fiscal Calendar, Main Accounts etc. are not in the DAT company, but rather stored in global tables (SaveDataPerCompany=No). It's a fallacy that I've seen repeatedly over the years and is a misperception by people not understanding the data model of AX or D365. Even when we built Axapta back in the mid-90es, we didn't really use the DAT company for this at all, but system-wide data was even back then stored in global tables without a dataAreaId (Company) field. This has been the case since the beta days (code name "Atlanta") as well as v1.0 when it was released on March 1st, 1998. AX 2012 changed things in a significant way by starting to introduce normalcy to this concept, but it wasn't new from a technical level only from a conceptual level - certain things like .company() was introduced by MFP then, but only to support better handling of virtual companies, which incidentally has now been killed off in D365.

Now, let's discuss the confusion: I have over the last 25 years worked with a varying number of customers on Axapta/AX/D365 and the same question is popped almost every time: Why shouldn't we use the DAT company? The answer? I really don't know.

Since we got rid of the support for single-company in the licensing model - I think that was commercially killed off around 1999 with the introduction of v2.0, but it was technically supported for quite a while. In fact, you could remove the license code and the kernel would still believe that you didn't have access to other companies.

I'm inclined to let the next customer create their company, delete the DAT company and work like that to see what really happens.

But, what I'd really like is Microsoft to respond and provide fact-based evidence to this.

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André Arnaud de Cal... 300,917 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi Jesper,

Thanks for some historical insights. As my observations concerns, there are at least some code dependencies left in the application. You are correct that the global tables do not have the dataAreaId field physically, but it is possible to retrieve it from statements like it was the DAT company. I know that some customizations done at customers relied on a dataAreaID "DAT" to check from e.g. a common object if a table is global or not. It was and is still considered as the global data company; even when the dataAreaID field is not stored.

I can indeed remember the details where a customer could use a few companies from the base license. On Axapta 2.5 one customer did use the DAT company to save license costs. As far as I can remember it did not really have side-effects. However, I would prefer to use an own coding system for legal entities.

This forum is not necessarily monitored by Microsoft. It looks like you know MFP personally. Probably, you can reach out to him directly and then update this thread with the insights provided by him?

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ZvikaR 168 on at

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I totally agree, and I still get questions from confused customers.

not to mention "DAT" still shows up as a selection in the UI, and further raises questions.

How difficult would it be to simply "hide" this company from showing up anywhere, if they want for some reason keep that row in the table.

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