I should also add that we have DSD multi-company/currency installed as well.  I couldn't find any documentation on DSD's site indicating whether the SQL version is supported or not, although, I can just ask DSD about that when the time comes.

I handle this by having a daily export from Sage to SQL server or Access. If necessary it creates a "Company" field in the table and merges data from multiple companies into one table. Performance can improve 100X. Main downsides are:

- someone has to maintain the export to make sure it is working

- your data is not real-time.

Thanks for the reply.  I am interested in how you have it set up.  Are you just exporting certain tables or all of them?  Also, how do you have the export and import scheduled?  I would like to see if I could get something similar set up in our implementation.

I only import the tables that I need.

I use a VB script in Access. The VB script can be initialized from the command prompt using a batch file. With multiple companies I had to set up a separate ODBC driver for each company on the computer that ran the import.  If you are interested in using Access I can copy and paste some of the scripts for you. The main downside with Access is that you are limited to a 2gb database which can fill up quick.

The nice thing about it is that you can also add indexes or consolidate data during the import to make it even faster to use in your applications.

I also do a lot in Access linked to the Sage Premium SQL database. We're also on version 4.5. We do tons of things with Access better, quicker and cheaper than we could do them within Sage.  We print our pick tickets with Access because with Sage we couldn't direct them automatically to the right warehouse without making the user manually choose the printer.

A couple of point about the above discussion. There need not be any 2GB limit because a)you could use multiple Access DBs to keep your data and b)you could store the data in another SQL database of any size and still do your Access front-end editing and reporting. And with the SQL Premium version you can update the SAGE data from a front-end like Access.

Thanks for the responses.  I ended up creating an SSIS package that we will run a few times a day to replicate a handful of tables to a SQL data warehouse.  I don't mind the speed on Crystal Reports, but our users would like to get Excel-Friendly reports with little hassle.  Plus this allows us to join MAS200 data with external systems.