Microsoft Navision: Why my Business Analytics (BA) Scheduler Job that I created using BA Configurator keeps on running and never ends ?

Microsoft Navision has its own nice Business Analytics (BA) Configurator tool to create scheduled operations. The technology used under the covers for this scheduled operations are our SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) runtime. Actually if you're familiar with SSIS, you should noticed that the generated .dtsx file actualy is an SSIS package.

One of our customer was telling that their BA Scheduler job which they created through BA Configurator was keep on running, never ends. We needed to deep dive to our mn runtime process dtexec.exe with our debugger WinDBG (which is part of our Debugging Tools for Windows package comes within Windows SDK). What I noticed was a thread was waiting to create a file in the temp folder of the executing user. This call has been coming from Navision ODBC Driver.

What would make a file not to be created in a folder ? Yes, correct guess... If the folder contains tens of thousands of file already. What we've checked was the temp folder content (You can see the current logged on user's temp folder by typing %TEMP% into Start/Run). As I guessed the temp folder was containing thousands of temp files. We cleaned up the temp folder and rerun the package and package did its job very quickly and issue resolved :)

Though this blog post mentions about Navision ODBC Driver and the problem created by it but it's not. As a rule of thumb, check your %TEMP% folder from time to time. (Please be aware, by saying "your" I mean the windows user who is running applications. It could be you or an account runs an application deals with temp files a lot). Like our moms said, tidying up your room is a good thing, it makes you happy too. I want to add one more thing, "It may save you from future troubles".

By the way, did you check your car's oil and water level recently ? :p

Hope this post helps you somewhere, sometime ...