CRM Learning Resources

Abe Saldana — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:00:31 GMT

Working on a CRM customization project one of my customer’s employee ask me on how to learn Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, and what public resources are available for him to get for free and learn on his own time, I was recalling some of the training documentation I was using at the beginning, but after a wile i lost some of the important links, so I resulted to find and publish some of the resources i used, so here is a short list with my personal top 15 resources.

Learning and Implementation

CRM 4.0 Implementation

Developer Ramp up kit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (Videos)

Performance and Scalability White papers

Logical Database Diagrams

Development Links:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Software Development Kit (SDK)

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Deployment Software Development Kit (SDK)

CRM Plug-In registration Tool

Diagnostics and Administration

CRM Diagnostics Tool

CRM Performance Tool

Latest Updates and Roll Ups

Books

Programming Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (Pro-Developer)

Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

CRM as a Rapid Development Platform

Abe Saldaña

CrmBuzz.net

Everything here, though, is my personal opinion and is not read nor approved before being posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.

Purging rows on Princiapl Object Access

Abe Saldana — Tue, 08 May 2007 03:23:24 GMT

[Disclaimer:All postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights.]

Purging some tables on Crm is simple as calling the delete service and make sure that everything continues running properly, but when you have more than 10 million rows on one table (PrincipalObjectAccess) how do you will be able to take the delete process on stages?

[MS Crm support response: There is an un-supported option that you could try if you want to get rid of all sharing that is currently setup in CRM. You could directly update the PrincipalObjectAccess table and set the AccessRightsMask and InheritedAccessRightsMask columns to 0. Then we have a deletion service that will go through and automatically clean up that table. This is not technically supported, but if you want to remove all sharing this could be an option that you could do.

Ok that is awesome, but how to identify the rows that are not in use or ready to be deleted.

This is one of the Sql scripts to get the total of rows ready to be deleted and terminated

declare @totalRows int
declare @ToDelete int
declare @ToDeleteMarked int

SELECT @totalRows = count( * )
FROM PrincipalObjectAccess (nolock)

SELECT @ToDelete= count( *)
FROM PrincipalObjectAccess (nolock)
where AccessRightsMask = 0
and InheritedAccessRightsMask > 0

SELECT @ToDeleteMarked= count( *)
FROM PrincipalObjectAccess (nolock)
where AccessRightsMask = 0
and InheritedAccessRightsMask = 0

Select @totalRows as TotalRows,
@ToDelete as ToDelete,
(@totalRows - @ToDelete) as RemainingRows,
@ToDeleteMarked as ToDeleteMarked

Using the previous script will give you the totals only the following script is the one that will update your columns and marked the rows for deletion..

[IMPORTANT: Make sure that you have SQL database backups before trying this and know that you may have to restore your databases if you run into issues. Also this can ONLY be done if you want to remove ALL sharing. There is not a way to leave some sharing intact. ]

SELECT top 500000 *
into #TempPOA FROM
PrincipalObjectAccess (nolock)
where AccessRightsMask = 0
and InheritedAccessRightsMask > 0

update PrincipalObjectAccess
set InheritedAccessRightsMask = 0
where rowguid in (Select rowguid from #tempPOA)

drop table #TempPOA

After finishing marking all the rows for deletion, now you can run the delete service, stop the service (not required) then run the following dos command

C:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM\Server\bin\CrmDeletionService.exe -runonce

[NOTE: -runonce = Clean up database right now.]

we schedule the deletion service to run only once a day, on a business downtime, this process will keep your tables purged and on optimal conditions

regards,
Abe Saldaña