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If Business Central is in the cloud, can I still use MS Access to query the cloud data?

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Posted on by Jus_Me

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If Business Central is in the cloud, can I still use MS Access to query the cloud data?

If so, how to I connect it(Access) to the BC cloud data?

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JAngle 157 on at

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WebServices can be consumed by Access so I think you can still use it:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/access.webservices

search for the web services page in BC and publish the required data. On the user record set a web service key. Use basic authentication with the username and web service key as the password.

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UbootMike 14 on at

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hello, does this solution work from JAngle ? or is there since then a better solution for that ?

i have nearly the same problem

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Steven Renders 5,698 Moderator on at

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Absolutely not. In BC Saas you do not have access to the database directly.

Instead use APIs, and if Ms Access supports reading/importing APIs then try that.

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DW-31100439-0 4 on at

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Natively you can't connect the BC in the cloud with an on-premise relational database or link it to MS Access tables. Think of BC in the cloud as a walled garden that you don't have direct access to the underlying database. The BC does have has an externally facing web service interface that you can add query tables to and you can run web commands to query this data and download on premise. It does get complicated pretty quickly, you need a programmer on hand and they need to overcome some fundamental challenges. For example, querying the BC web service is slow and you need to work how you are going to handle delta loads.

There are several integration vendors who provide connectors to BC and these pre-built connectors sound like and easy solution but they can be quite expensive. Have a look at CDATA for reference. If you are looking for a relatively cheap solution, have a look at Sharperlight. It will synchronise a SQL Server reporting database on-premise and you can easily access these synchronised tables. Sharperlight is a self service reporting tool that has an Excel add-in for query formulas in Excel and web reporting and dashboarding. To give you fast and reactive reporting it synchronises the cloud data locally into an easily accessible SQL Server database (you could use SQL Server Express if you like). It isn't reliant on third party connectors, it has its own integration to query BC web service end-points and it comes with a scheduling tool that regularly delta refresh the data.

Hope this helps.

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