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Microsoft Dynamics NAV blogosphere wasn’t particularly active in February. Trust me, I don’t blame anyone for it. February is a slow month.

Economy is down, forests are burning in Australia, planes are crashing in Netherlands. Whatever the reason, NAV bloggers weren’t as active in February, as they were in January.

Still, there were some noteworthy posts, that I’d rather bookmark for the posterity, and if you missed some of them, here is your chance to catch up.

Let’s start with Ziggy. His posts are always useful, and his only post of February 2009 is again a very useful reference post: Item priorities when running planning engine. I love this kinds of posts: they are useful for both consultants wanting to know more about the application, and for customers who need to understand the specifics of certain NAV algorithms. Give the man the click he deserves.

Last week I delivered the course 8873A C/SIDE Development in NAV 5.0 for partner community in Zagreb, Croatia. A great event, and a great group of people! One of the questions they asked was about help, how to maintain it, how to extend it etc. With 5.0 it’s not a simple matter, but with NAV 2009 the things are much better: Paul Chapman explains on Microsoft Dynamics NAV Team Blog about the Help Toolkit and Source Files for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009.

Another topic that I covered at the training last week was performance on NAV 5.0 SP1. Majority of attendees had limited experience with NAV 5.0 SP1 (no wonder, since we poor Croatians always lag at least a year after W1 release until we get our own localized version), and even more limited experience with SQL Server—Native database still has a certain lore to it in partner/customer community, and people for some reason still believe “it kicks SQL’s behind”. Well, it doesn’t. Microsoft Dynamics CEE blog reveals the results of extensive performance testing of NAV 5.0 SP1 which conclusively proves that the days when Native was faster are long gone. In short, according to this report, SQL beats Native on any number of concurrent users, especially at higher levels of concurrency. Check out the whole report by clicking here.

Stefano Demiliani posted yet another post about NAV, this time about optimizing the NAV database using table partitioning. If you are up to hardcore database optimization, and are open to tips from the real pros, check this out.

Another useful SQL tip comes from Rashed Amini, the MVP (The ara3n weblog) who checked out new SQL Server 2008 compression compression with a NAV database. Not only he finds it useful, but he also triggered Kriki, another MVP, to post a follow-up with more testing results. All in all, both posts are worth your click.

Erik P. Ernst has took time to compile a reference of useful links on Partnersource. As he notes (and I second to that), Partnersource isn’t the best organized site in the world, and finding your way through it can be a nightmare. This post is worth bookmarking, so click here to check it out for yourself.

Freddy has run another series of performance tests over Solid-State Drives, and has published his findings in a blog post. He shows a consistent 20%-30% performance increase with SSD over classic disks, which to me proves that investing in SSD technology is worth the buck.

Bill Warnke posted a list of Microsoft Dynamics NAV blogs he frequents. It’s not a yet another list of the sort, as it might reveal a few blogs you haven’t been aware of yet (it certainly did this for me). Click here to check out the list, and see if there is anything new for you there.

Last but not least, my dear friend Vibor posts about RoleTailored user experience in NAV 2009 again. Check it out, and learn some more about Microsoft Dynamics new standard for human-computer interaction.

That’s all, folks! I hope there is at least something useful for you here, and I hope my March review will be twice this long. Sayonara!