Reporting speed is about it. Even Sage's own benchmarks show that the processing speed in Advanced is faster than Premium.

So, this begs the question.  Why have a complete separate product with sql added?

We've had customers upgrade simply to allow their important reports to run faster.

Hi Paula,

You also get the extra security of knowing that your data is guarded in SQL tables, rather than windows files.

I'm not really a SQL expert,  but it seems like the few clients who have insisted on SQL wanted it so that their internal programmers could interface more easily.   By the time all was said and done,  I get the impression that they didn't do as much interfacing as they thought they were going to.  I could be wrong.

And I have had clients that used advanced and did a lot of interfacing with SQL into Sage 100 by refreshing a SQL database from Sage 100 periodically.

Agree with Tom here.  Writing apps directly against the SQL tables is so much easier than rooting around the COM.

I'll jump on the SQL bandwagon as well.  If you have the need to clean up data or make any changes, SQL is much easier to work with than a VI Job or anything like that.  You're not going to see much performance increase inside the program itself.  Certain lookups will load quicker if they have a lot of information in them.  The time that it takes for screens to load is a bit slower.  

Outside Sage pulling anything out of SQL is tremendously quicker.  If you have any other SQL backed applications, your users will appreciate Sage moving to SQL.  Note third part add-ons don't always work the say way 100 does out of the box. We recently went to SQL and had to install SQL on the same server as our application server.  Otherwise performance was terrible.  

I am having a difficult time finding the System Requirements for the SQL version.  Do we need Microsoft SQL Server.  Also, we are considering getting Sage CRM.  I think that program requires Microsoft SQL server?