Sage 100

Looking for some feedback on Sage 100 Premium and in particular report printing performance. Have you found that the Premium version standard reports generate faster than those in the advanced or standard versions? Let's say for example the A/R aged invoice report, this report can be time consuming if there are a large number of customers and open invoices. Would this report be generated more quickly in the premium version?

I don't think there is any discernable difference in the speed of standard reports since it's still using Providex programming to extract the data and push it to a working table However, custom reports are very quick as the data is pulling directly from SQL. So, we create new custom reports for any customer that needs a standard report but faster!

We are having a session regarding the differences of Adv and Premium and how to make SQL scream for reporting. Not too late sign up if you haven't already done so for MOTM 2017

I will be attending so yes I should definitely sign up for that session. Thanks for mentioning it Jeff.

My observations with large data sets going from ProvideX Advanced to SQL Premium are: SQL Premium... Slightly slower in many of the standard data entry processes and reports (i.e., A/R Aging). I think this has to do with the program [still ProvideX] making an extra call to R/W to / from SQL. Dramatic improvements in BI Explorer Dramatic improvements in Crystal reports Dramatic improvements in any export of data into Excel, Access, etc.

Thanks for the feedback Andrew. When you say Crystal Reports, i'm presuming you mean reports that you've created yourself, running against the SQL tables and not temporary work files?

For BIG data Premium is definitely the way to go. I had a customer with Lots of AP transactional history. Providex couldn't handle it.

@JimWoodhead What level of ""BIG"" - was it file size? Number of records? A combination? Any type of general guideline that you've found -- ie. File size of x GB or xx records?

@WayneSchulz and @JimWoodhead Back in 2013, I had the unfortunate pleasure of upgrading a client from the older MAS200 to 4.50 premium. The A/R aged invoice report took about 3 minutes to run in MAS200, whereas the standard aged invoice report in Premium took over 20 minutes. The AR Trans History had 1 million 500k records Open Invoice 734 k AR Customer 5,649 Invoice history header 466 k invoice history detail 3 million 370 k. As a workaround I took the old 3.71 A/R Aged invoice custom report and upgraded that through the various ProvideX versions to 4.50 then converted the report to use SQL tables and OLE/DB driver. The end result was much faster than the standard 4.50 SQL aged invoice report but not as fast as ProvideX. This particular upgrade was one of the main reasons that I posed the original question about Premium and report performance. I have since done other premium upgrades to more recent 2015 and 2016 versions but fortunately I haven't encountered clients with as many AR records and while the Standard reports are definitely slow, they're not slow enough to cause these particular clients to complain.