Some introduction into Great Plains Software products, now Microsoft Business Solutions. Microsoft Great Plains becomes more and more popular, partly because of Microsoft muscles behind it. Now it is targeted to the whole spectrum of horizontal and vertical market clientele. Small companies use Small Business Manager (which is based on the same technology ? Great Plains Dexterity dictionary DYNAMICS.DIC and runtime DYNAMICS.EXE), Great Plains Standard on MSDE is for small to midsize clients, and then Great Plains serves the rest of the market up to big corporations.

If you are database administrator who is helping the version on Pervasive SQL.2000/Ctree ? read this and you will have the clues on where to look further.

1. Microsoft Great Plains Tables Structure ? Launch Great Plains and go to Tools->Resource Description->Tables. Find the table in the proper series. If you are looking for the customers ? it should be RM00101 ? customer master file, account master file - GL00101, Sales Header Work file - SOP10200 - and you got the idea.

2. Use Microsoft Access. Lunch Microsoft Access and make a link to Microsoft Great Plains tables. This will allow you to do data modification/repair. Some people are attempting to use Pervasive control center - we do not recommend this - MS Access does job finer.

3. Locked batch repair ? unlocking the batch, which was interrupted in posting. The tables: SYoo500 - batch header - you need to change Batch Status or Marked for Posting field

4. Activity table - If you have user locked in Great Plains - just ask all the other users exit and delete ACTIVITY.BTR (Pervasive) or ACTIVITY.DAT (Ctree)

5. Crystal Report link to Pervasive/Ctree - you have to install Pervasive SQL ODBC driver from Great Plains Dynamics CD. This will allow you to deploy ODBC connection to Great Plains database

6. Sometimes you have to rescue to Great Plains Dexterity- when you need ongoing data import and you do not own Great Plains Integration manager or when Integration Manager doesn't have the object to deploy. This is proprietary Great Plains Software tool and development environment and you need some time invested, before you can do programming.

7. Complex Data Migration - use MS SQL Linked Server - you can create linked server to Pervasive/ctree and then you can create the cursor, coming through all the tables in your migration set - we usually recommend reading tables schema in MS SQL Server (it is the same to Pervasive) and pull the data from Pervasive database using EXEC statement in Transact SQL.

Happy data repairing! if you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies ? USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, based in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Houston, Austin, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Canada, UK, Australia, Europe, Moscow and having locations in multiple US states (www.albaspectrum.com), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, MS Access, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer.