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MAS 200 SQL 4.45: A Huge Step Forward In Speed Of Reporting And Integration Ease

June 15, 2010 by Wayne Schulz

In a blog post on his site yesterday, Doug Deane President DSD Business Systems describes a recent visit that two of his top technical people made to Sage North America headquarters where they received an early look at the MAS200 SQL 4.45 release.

The session apparently afforded an opportunity to grill Sage development staff about the capabilities in MAS 200 SQL 4.45 and Jon Reiter (pictured below) and Jim Woodhead, both of DSD Business Systems, came away suitably impressed.

According to Doug’s post a small group of channel partners were invited to spend time with Sage in Irvine to provide feedback on the MAS 200 SQL 4.4 product prior to it’s release.

Some of Doug’s comments:

Very large datasets were tested quickly on external custom Crystal Reports
BIE (Business Insights Explorer) was fast
Because there are no SQL Server stored procedures a single code base will be maintained which allows for smoother integration with and support by third party products.

Read Doug’s full post at Sage MAS200 SQL – A Huge Step Forward

DSD Business Systems SQL Mirroring YouTube Demo

May 13, 2009 by Wayne Schulz

Would you like to have the advantage of the significant performance improvement offered by SQL data tables? Well you can with an enhancement for Sage MAS 90 or 200 that mirrors your data tables into SQL in real time.

SQL Mirroring for Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 product that DSD Business Systems has offered for the past few years that they were demonstrating at Insights 2009.

From DSD Business Systems’ Product Page:

SQL Mirroring allows a user (version 4.05 to 4.30) to choose which Sage MAS 90 and Sage MAS 200 Data files to be mirrored directly into a SQL Database in “Real Time” . This means as the records are added, updated, or removed from the native Providex Database, a live record will be mirrored to your chosen SQL Database.The user may use Crystal reports to report directly from the SQL database.

For Sage MAS 90 and Sage MAS 200 Form Printing, if the module is a “Business Framework” module, then the Crystal Work Files are mirrored to SQL automatically.

NOTE: The SQL Mirroring product only writes, removes, and updates the SQL Database, but doesn’t read from it. Therefore, if you use another application to write to the SQL Database, those changes will NOT be reflected back into MAS90.

We’ve used this at a client who mirrored some large MAS 90 tables and the setup was easy (about 30 minutes tops) and once running the process is seamless with the tables mirroring in the background with no intervention on the users part.

Naturally reporting off the SQL tables is lightning fast and as noted in the product description any of the framework modules can have their Crystal Reports take advantage of SQL Mirroring.

Link – DSD Business Systems SQL Mirroring for Sage MAS 90 and 200

MAS 90 SQL coming natively in v4.4+ – possibly no support for legacy modules

May 12, 2009 by Wayne Schulz

As an update to the morning announcement by Motasim Najeeb that MAS90 would now have a native SQL database starting soon after version 4.4 we have the following information:

Q1 2010 is release of 4.4

Beta of 4.4 SQL 3 to 6 months post release of 4.4

Still undetermined is whether legacy (non-framework) modules will be useable under the new SQL database. It appears that Sage does not yet have a definitive answer.

Also undetermined is the fate of MAS 200 SQL 3.74 but we would expect a life cycle announcement prior to the end of Insights.

Sage announces MAS 90 SQL for version 4.4+

May 12, 2009 by Wayne Schulz

In a keynote address today to the Sage Insights 2009 conference in Nashville, TN company CTO Motasim Najeeb announced that SQL is on the road map for MAS 90 and MAS 200 users. This is slated to appear enter beta sometime 3 to 6 months after version 4.4 is delivered in the newly rescheduled timeframe of Q1 2010. There’s no announced delivery of the final release for SQL.

What Happens To MAS 200 SQL 3.74?

Still unknown is the fate of MAS 200 SQL v3.74. This product has long been “stuck” back in the 3.x code base with no plans that we’ve heard for it to be upgraded.

We believe the most likely path will be for a migration path to be offered for MAS 200 SQL 3.74 users to get them to 4.4 and then eventually to MAS 90 SQL.

There are several things that are still unknown about this morning’s SQL announcement. There was no mention of timeframe final release for the development of MAS 90 SQL – so this offering may still be several years out. Lots can happen in several years.

When the first MAS 200 SQL was announced we were in the conference room where the Sage technical people indicated that the version would ship before the end fo the year. The actual shipping date for MAS 200 SQL slipped several times and missed that informal conference deadline by at least a year.

From DSD Business Systems’ Product Page:

What Happens To MAS 200 SQL 3.74?

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