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A few years ago a customer with a lot of stores and Business Central On Premises was exhausted about posting performances and wanted to go in the Cloud.
The night was no longer enough to post all documents and during the day posting was blocking normal operations.
For everyone the Cloud would have been the best, because:
- Always updated
- Run on the best hardware
- Run in the most advanced datacenters
- It’s the Cloud
Store documents posting process
Each store transmits (more or less in real time) the Receipts to Business Central. Each Receipt contains the items sold and are grouped in a daily document. That document generates a Sales Invoice:
- Posting of the revenues
- Posting of takings (cash, credit cards…)
- Inventory decrease and valuation
The process is simple but, with many stores, the amount of data is huge.
The example show a pharmacy chain with about fifty stores. Each store makes about 300 receipts per day, with about 1.000 item rows. Every day the chain generates about 50.000 rows, about 20M rows per year.
To reduce the impact on Item Ledger Entries, the daily invoice is grouped per item, with the average amount of sales.
On Premises vs. Cloud
I’m lucky to have two very similar customers, one still On Premises, one in the Cloud:
- About same number of stores
- About same number of daily receipts
- About same number of users
But the most important thing: they have the identical APP stack (today BC 26.1, RCSI, tri-state locking, the same “vertical” APP…)
Let’s go to the performance test:
To group, prepare and post a daily invoice with about 400 item rows:
- 1 minute an 16 seconds in the Cloud
- 18 seconds On Premises
🤯
I swear: no tricks or low level tuning in the On Premises database.
Performance are the same regardless of concurrency or time of the day or day of the week. At least on this tenant of an Italian customer.
Conclusion
Talking with other partners it emerges that the situation is known and afflicts a lot of huge instances in the cloud.
Hey Microsoft, the Business Central offer should be extended with dedicated instances. And, why not, with the freedom to choose (and access!) the right SQL Azure service.