Great Plains Dynamics on Pervasive SQL Support FAQ

There were several licensing issues with this transition, one of them was capping employee count at 500 employees for Great Plains Standard (successor of Great Plains on Pervasive) – this cap made impossible for small payroll service firms to serve their clients (including corporations with high number of employees) out of Great Plains.  We still see some number of GP Dynamics installations and we would like to give some support highlights in this small article:

1. How to move on and upgrade to current version of GP?  There are two sides: business and technical.  Business side will require you to reenroll your company to Microsoft Business Solutions annual enhancement program, if you are not current (more likely the case since you are on very old version of Dynamics).  Annual enhancement is percentage of software pricelist, around 16-18%, plus expect reenrollment fee above that.  When you are back in enhancement program – you get reg key for newest and previous versions of GP.  Technical side is not very difficult – there is migration tool, which will allow you to migrate to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005 based version (path depends on your circumstances), you will need professional GP consulting firm to do this job
2. Typical support issues.  One of the most popular support topics is Location Translation problem.  In order to understand location translation for Btrieve or Ctree you should be aware, that these DB platforms require user workstation data request processing (opposite to SQL Server case – where GP workstation sends tabular text request to SQL Server and waits the response).  This means that your user computer, where you have GP workstation installed should know where server data is located (exact directory and path to your Dynamics and companies folders).  Now if you move your GP database to new server or different stand along workstation, the old location typically changes and you need to do so-called location translation procedure.  This location translation scenario is tipically complicated with Btrieve kernel and requester settings, manifesting when you move GP data to new computer
3. GP on Pervasive Data repair techniques.  Our favorite instrument is Microsoft Access, where we make ODBC links to Great Plains tables.  This tool will allow you to have Access queries to GP database and if it not a full featured SQL connection, it is in most of the cases efficient to data repair needs
4. Crystal Reports to Pervasive SQL database.  Here you work through ODBC connection to Btrieve DB.  Based on the connection method you either deploy Dexterity keys or do ad hoc select statements to the data (which is slower)
5. Microsoft SQL Server Linked Server technique.  This is another hint on hooking up Pervasive SQL 2000 data via ODBC connection, in this case you should consider building heterogeneous SQL queries with Openrowset statements