Dynamics 365 • 20th September 2022

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: How much space is used by 1M transactions (General Journals)

Feature

This post continues exploring the question of how much storage space a transaction takes in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365BC) database (DB). The methodological foundation has already been laid in the “Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: How much space is used by 1M transactions (Sales Invoice)” post. Therefore, this article omits the methodological details and instead focuses on the information pertinent to this experiment addressing Journal transactions.

A General Journal transaction for the purpose of this study is defined as a General Ledger (G/L) Account to G/L Account entry that is balanced on the same line and contains the applicable Dimensions, but is not set to automatically calculate any sales taxes. Unlike, for example, a Sales Invoice, such a transaction does not have Item or Customer Ledger Entries; neither does it have any shipment-related entries.

Below is a screenshot of the General Journal Batch prepared for this experiment:

Figure 1: The General Journal Batch

The Batch in question consisted of one thousand (1K) Lines such as the ones shown in Figure 1 above. This Batch was posted in the experimental Company (“2022.02.22-Test”) and the results were compared to the control Company (“2022.02.22-Control”). The differences in the data set sizes between the two Companies can be viewed on the “Data Administration” Page:

Figure 2: The “Data Administration” Page

Figure 2 above shows the data size in KB in the Companies under investigation: 31520 (control) and 32552 (experimental) making it possible to calculate the difference:
a) the difference between the data size in the control and experimental Companies, based on 1K records: 32552 – 31520 = 1032 (KB);
b) the difference in GB: 1032 / 1048576 ≈ 0.001 (GB);
c) the storage used by 1M records: 0.001 * 1000 = 1 (GB).

This is approximately ten times less storage space taken by General Journal transactions than the analogous number of Sales Invoices (based on the “Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: How much space is used by 1M transactions (Sales Invoice)” study).

The 1M / year transaction rate is approximately 4K transactions per business day (based on 255 working days per year). Medium-sized businesses may rarely reach this transactional volume. However, those that do reach it are unlikely to run out of the base application storage within next several years as the limit is set to 80 GB by Microsoft (Microsoft, 2022) (based on the Cloud, also known as “SaaS” – software as a service hosted version of D365BC). Nevertheless, there are certain practices that can either make the storage space get used relatively fast or, on the contrary help substantially extend the period of time required to use the base storage space. KMicro specialists help businesses with best practices around D365BC storage space and beyond. If you have any questions related to D365BC, contact us.

References
Microsoft Documents (Microsoft) (2022). Retrieved August 22, 2022, from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/tenant-admin-center-capacity

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