Microsoft Dataverse is the cloud data platform for the Microsoft Power Platform that is easy to use, compliant, secure, scalable, and globally available. Dataverse requires no or little code to be written, so it can easily be used by everyone from knowledge workers to professional developers.
Using Microsoft Dataverse as the data store for apps has many benefits:
- Metadata: Properties you define on a data model are used by Power Apps, speeding up the building of apps.
- Data access: control who can access which tables, rows, and columns.
- Logic: Calculations and rules can be added to table columns.
- Import and export: multiple tools for data management are available, including Excel.
- Audit: track who accesses and changes data.
- Processes: Business processes can be added to ensure data quality and perform automation.
- Managed data in the cloud: built-in backups and pre-configured databases.
- Storage: built-in storage management.
- Skills: No DBA skills are needed to manage Dataverse.
- Secure: All data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
- Integration: Dataverse is deeply integrated with Microsoft cloud services such as Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure.
- Proven: Microsoft Dataverse is used by Dynamics 365 apps such as Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
- Connectors: Microsoft Dataverse has connectors for Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI.
Dataverse allows to use Common Data Model (CDM) which includes a set of standardized, extensible data schemas that Microsoft and its partners have published. This collection of predefined schemas includes tables, attributes, semantic metadata, and relationships.
There are multiple ways to import and export data into Microsoft Dataverse including dataflows, Power Query, Azure Synapse Link, Azure Data Factory, Azure Logic Apps, and Power Automate.
Dataflows allow to connect with business data from various sources, clean the data, transform it, and then load it into Dataverse.
Data Factory is a data integration service that provides a low-code or no-code approach to construct extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes within a visual environment or by writing custom code. In addition to bringing data into Dataverse, Data Factory can also be used to prepare, transform, and enrich data with Databricks and move data into Azure Synapse Analytics and use in Power BI.
Exporting data, either to another data technology or to another environment, can use any of the same technologies mentioned for importing data, such as dataflows, Data Factory, Power Query, and Power Automate.
Integrating with apps by using events can be achieved using webhooks, Azure messaging (Service Bus, Event Hubs), Azure Logic Apps, or Power Automate.
Reference materials
Microsoft Learn:
Business Excellence 