https://stefanmaron.com/tags/database/Recent content in Database on Stefan Maron | Business Central & AL DevelopmentHugo -- gohugo.ioThu, 10 Sep 2026 07:33:46 +0200https://stefanmaron.com/posts/bcdb-restore-write-a-cloud-export-into-a-container/Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:33:46 +0200https://stefanmaron.com/posts/bcdb-restore-write-a-cloud-export-into-a-container/bcdb could already open a .bak or a .bacpac and read anything in it, no SQL Server involved. That was genuinely useful for AL Runner , which is why I built it in the first place, but it didn’t do much for a developer’s normal day. For that, you want the data sitting in a database you can query, click through, and run BC against. Since v0.2.0, bcdb restore is what changes that: it writes a source’s rows straight into a container that’s already running, and it doesn’t ask the container’s schema to match the source first.https://stefanmaron.com/posts/bcdb-read-business-central-backups-without-sql-server/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:40:40 +0200https://stefanmaron.com/posts/bcdb-read-business-central-backups-without-sql-server/Say someone hands you a customer’s BC backup and you need to check one field on one table. The normal path is: find or spin up a SQL Server, restore the file, wait for however long that takes on however large the database is, connect, query, and then decide whether to keep that SQL Server around or tear it down. All of that just to read a handful of values.https://stefanmaron.com/posts/bc-database-transactions-deep-dive/Sun, 15 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0100https://stefanmaron.com/posts/bc-database-transactions-deep-dive/I thought I knew how transactions worked in Business Central. Then I started actually testing them, and I was genuinely shocked by a few things. This stream is me working through it live, building a small test extension and watching what commits and errors actually do to the database. The full stream is on YouTube — this post covers the key findings. All the code from the stream ended up at github.https://stefanmaron.com/posts/table-keys-and-sql-indexes-in-business-central/Sat, 20 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0100https://stefanmaron.com/posts/table-keys-and-sql-indexes-in-business-central/I’ve wanted to dig into this topic properly for a long time. How do AL table keys actually translate to SQL Server indexes? What SQL does Business Central generate from your AL queries? And does adding a key actually help — or can it hurt? This stream was my attempt to answer all of that with real numbers. The full stream is on YouTube: Table keys and SQL Indexes – The BC Coding Stream The test setup I used waldo’s BCPerfTool as the harness.https://stefanmaron.com/posts/automated-export-objects-from-c-al/Mon, 07 Sep 2020 05:44:17 +0000https://stefanmaron.com/posts/automated-export-objects-from-c-al/This time I have some tips on how to use GIT integration when developing in C/AL with docker. When used to AL development one of the first things to notice when going back to C/AL is, that you do not have any version control. To solve this problem, I added a little bit of SQL code to the [Object] table as SQL Trigger. This trigger exports each edited object as TXT file to specified folder.https://stefanmaron.com/posts/coding4performance-5-findset-vs-findfirst/Thu, 23 Jul 2020 06:26:19 +0000https://stefanmaron.com/posts/coding4performance-5-findset-vs-findfirst/Today in coding for performance, we talk a bit about FindSet and FindFirst. I actually had plans to make this one the first post in this series. But it turned out that the differences between this two commands are not as obvious as I first thought. Let me first place a huge disclaimer here: Everything I test and explain here is done with Business Central version 16. It might be that earlier versions of BC and NAV behaved differently.