What’s the content of the DAT Company in AX2012

Someone asked me today what the DAT Company in AX2012 is needed for.

If you Google, you’ll read that it contains „Setup data“, but I think that’s not really true. What could that Setup data be?

  • Company dependant functional setup, like CustGroup, SalesParameters, is stored in that specific company, so that can’t be it.
  • Company independant setup, like SystemParameters, NumberSequenceTable, EcoResAttributeType, is stored without a „dataAreaId“ column, so that cannot be it.

No, I think this has to be phrased differently:

There are some tables that contain data both for per Company and cross Company Scenarios. In these cases, the records for the per company scenarios will have the dataAreaId of the specific company – and the cross company Scenarios will have the dataAreaId DAT.

As an example, take the database log (table SysDatabaseLog):

  • Changes to the per company table CustGroup will be stored in the company in which the CustGroup record was modified.
  • Changes to the cross company table Currency will be stored in DAT.

Oh, but I of course agree 100% that you shouldn’t try to delete the DAT company!