I’ve met many people who imagine that everyone who works at Microsoft must be of a single mind, with one goal – much like a hive mentality. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are an organization of individuals, often passionate about our beliefs and very emotionally invested in the work that we do. We’re very proud of our successes and we want to learn from our failures. We’re very human. And as such, when I was asked to work with a team that would decouple the NAV product from our native database, it was with an element of sadness that I agreed. I can also admit that I wanted to do the job because, like many of you, I’ve worked with this product for over a decade and I wanted this one to happen by someone who understood what we were saying farewell to.
You shouldn’t be burdened with the technical details about decoupling the files from our build system, generating the lists of extra dlls that we no longer need to install, or reviewing documentation that has references to the database format. When we are about to commit a huge change like this to our internal systems, we send an email to all team members informing them of an impending ‘Breaking Change’ and to give teams a last chance to speak up about the impact this will have in their work cycles. There were almost no issues raised but I did receive a large number of comments from team members along the lines of “are you sure we want to take this away,” “aren’t we giving up the NAV simplicity,” and “this is sad.” And a part of me agreed.
But it’s not really sad. The day we committed this change was a bit like the last day of High School. We’ve all had a fabulous time but our future is ahead.
It’s not sad because the original goal of Navision was not to become a best of breed database product – we wanted to build business applications. We happened to build a very clever little database at the same time but it was never the goal to have the database as the reason that people buy NAV.
It’s not sad because now we focus on SQL Server and we can ensure that SQL is the platform we do our enhancements on. And aim to improve performance on. And benchmark on.
We can spare our Quality Assurance (Test) organization the pain of testing on a legacy platform and double our efforts into the SQL stack. We can spare our developers from maintaining data connections for two different platforms and spare ourselves the discussion about how to take advantage of SQL features without impacting the way the native database is used.
I’m looking forward to everything we can now do and I hope you will join us too.
For more information about the Statement of Direction for Microsoft Dynamics NAV where we talk about ending support for the native NAV database, see this blog post.