What are Microsoft Dataverse best practices?

Microsoft Dataverse (formerly known as Common Data Service) is a data platform that allows users to store, manage, and access data. Its a core part of the Microsoft PowerPlatform so the data here is visible in Microsoft Dynamics, Power Bi and all the PowerApps you build. In this blog we’ll look a number of best practices for working with Dataverse and the potential challenges.

A few best practices

1. Plan your data model before creating entities: Understand the relationships and requirements of the data before creating entities. This will help ensure a clean and efficient data model.
2. Use standard entities: Microsoft provides a set of standard entities that can be used for common data scenarios. These entities include things like accounts, contacts, and leads. It is best practice to use these standard entities whenever possible to take advantage of built-in functionality.
3. Use calculated fields: Calculated fields can be used to create new fields that are based on the values of other fields. This can help reduce the need for custom code and improve the performance of your solution.
4. Leverage security roles: Dataverse provides a flexible security model that allows you to control access to data based on user roles. Use security roles to ensure that users only have access to the data they need.
5. Monitor performance: Monitor the performance of your solution to ensure that it is running efficiently. Use the built-in performance dashboard to identify and resolve any issues

Some potential challenges

Keep in mind the limitations: Dataverse has certain limitations, such as data storage limit, number of entities and fields limit.

1. Data storage limit: A Dataverse database currently is limited to 4TB in size. Storage capacity is pooled across your organization’s tenant. You get a base 10GB then an additional 50 MB for every per app license you have. A per user license gives you an additional 250 MB, and Dynamics 365 per user license gives you an additional 1GB. How its divided up between your organization is based on environments and how much each environment is using. Note that each sandbox and production environment you provision will reserve a minimum of 1GB. The Power Platform admin center has analytical storage reports for you to view how storage is being used in the Environments, such as a breakdown by each table. (source accessed 20/1/23)
2. Number of entities and fields limit: There’s a limit of 2,500 custom entities and 2,500 custom fields per organization. This means that you can only create 2,500 custom entities and 2,500 custom fields in total for an organization.
3. Number of records per entity limit: each entity has a limit of 2 billion records. This means that you can only store 2 billion records for each custom entity.
4. Field length limit: Dataverse has a limit of 2,000 characters for a single-line of text field and 32,768 characters for a multi-line of text field.

It’s important to keep these limitations in mind when designing your solution and plan accordingly. If you need to work with more data or more complex scenarios, you may want to consider using other platforms such as Azure SQL Database or Azure Data Lake Storage.