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Creating tenants from companies in Business Central

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If your Business Central solution includes multiple companies in one database, you can choose to migrate to multitenancy where the Business Central companies become tenants of your application database.

Companies in multitenancy deployments

In Business Central, you can maintain multiple companies in each business database, and you can choose to export all or some of the companies to separate tenant databases. A tenant database can contain one or more companies. Therefore, you can deploy the number of tenants that suits your solution. This varies between solutions. You may prefer to have a dedicated tenant database for each legal entity in your deployment. Or you may prefer to have a tenant database for each group of legal entities where each legal entity is a Business Central company in that tenant database. In this example, we assume that your current deployment consists of one or more databases with multiple companies in each database. If you migrate your solution as suggested by the examples in this section, you will have a deployment where your application is stored in a dedicated application database. Each company in the original database will be moved into a dedicated business database, which is mounted as tenants on a Business Central Server instance.

Important

Before you can create tenants from Business Central companies, you must have exported the application to a dedicated application database. For more information, see Separating Application Data from Business Data.

Running a Windows PowerShell script to create tenants from companies

Business Central includes a sample Windows PowerShell script and a sample SQL script, HowTo-MoveCompanyToTenant.ps1 and HowTo-MoveCompanyToTenant.sql. These scripts illustrate how you can move company-specific data to new business databases and mount them as new tenants. You can modify the scripts and then run them in the Business Central Administration Shell.

Note

This approach doesn't work if the source or destination database is running on Azure SQL database.

The HowTo-MoveCompanyToTenant.ps1 script uses Business Central cmdlets and SQL commands to copy data from a Business Central company in a business database to a new tenant database. It mounts the tenant database on a Business Central Server instance, and then deletes the data and the company from the original database. You can adapt the scripts to your solution and rename them so that they do not start with "HowTo-". Then, you can run the MoveCompanyToTenant.ps1 script in Windows PowerShell with the relevant parameters as shown in the following example.

MoveCompanyToTenant -ServerInstance 'BC' -FromDatabase 'Demo Database NAV (13-0)' -CompanyName 'CRONUS International Ltd.' -OldTenantName default -NewTenantName CRONUS1 -ServiceAccount 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE' -DatabaseServer MySQLServer

In the example, the script will move the CRONUS International Ltd. company from the Demo Database NAV (13-0) database to a new tenant database, CRONUS1.The script also adds an account for the Business Central Server instance in the new database and removes the company from the original database. All information that is stored in shared tables, but which is specific to the company, is copied to the new tenant. The following table describes the parameters and the parameter values in the example.

Parameter Value Description
ServerInstance BC The name of the Business Central Server instance.
FromDatabase Demo Database NAV \(13-0\) The name of the business database that the company must be moved from.

This database must have been upgraded to Business Central, and you must have exported the application tables to an application database. For more information, see Separating Application Data from Business Data.
CompanyName CRONUS International Ltd. The name of the company that you want to move to a new tenant database.
OldTenantName default The name of the tenant in the database that you are exporting from.

In many cases, you are working with a single-tenant business database that contains multiple companies. If you did not specify another ID for the tenant when you created the tenant database, specify default. If you have added more tenants to the solution, you must specify the tenant name.
NewTenantName CRONUS1 The name of the new tenant database.

In the example, this is based on the name of the original company. But because this value will identify the tenant, the value must be unique.

For example, if the name of the company is Spotsmeyer's Furnishings, the name of the new tenant database can be SPOTSMEYERS. Alternatively, you can use a naming scheme of your choice, such as TENANT1, TENANT2, and so on.
ServiceAccount NT AUTHORITY\\NETWORK SERVICE The account that Business Central Server uses to access SQL Server. In a default deployment, this is the NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE account.
DatabaseServer MySQLServer The name of the database tier server where the current business database is located. The new tenant database for the exported company will be created on the same server.
RemoveCompanyWhenMoved Specifies if each company must be deleted in the original tenant database when it is created in the new tenant database. The default value is true. Therefore, you must set the parameter to false if you do not want the script to delete the companies.

The script uses the sqlcmd utility to create the database, assign database permissions to the service account, and move the data. This utility is part of SQL Server. The script creates four temporary tables in the original database to handle user-specific data, company-specific data, tables that will not be moved, and user IDs. You must modify the MoveCompanyToTenant.sql script to change the default values.

Migrating to Multitenancy
Multitenant Deployment Architecture