Database as a Service

Microsoft Dataverse is essentially a database as a service that sits inside Power Platform. It can be used for storing a large amount of data in the cloud for use with Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents.

The main benefits of using Microsoft Dataverse are -

• Low Code - Build business apps and business processes with no or little code.
• Secure - Store your business data securely with built in Authentication and Auditing.
• Business Logic - You can use business rules and workflows to validate and process your data to ensure data consistency.
• Scalable - Dataverse can support large amounts of data, making it great for large projects and applications.

How it works

Dataverse is built in databases and inside these databases are the tables that store our business records or rows. Each table can have many columns with a variety of date types e.g. Text, Number and Date. If you've ever used a SharePoint list, you can think of these tables like that.

Dataverse is a relational database similar to SQL server, that means we have multiple tables with relationships between the data. These relationships can be One-to-One, One-to-Many and Many-to-Many.

Below is an idea of how those relationships work, with many students studying many subjects. One school having many teachers and also one Head Teacher.

Dataverse Logic

Dataverse has some logic features out of the box for manipulating and validating data. These features run server side to ensure data quality and consistency. Using these we can run actions on our data when specific conditions are met.

Business Rules

Dataverse lets us create business rules to improve our data quality. We can create rules that apply when a specific condition is met. Maybe we want to set a rule where we add a new column that contains a 20% tax value to a specific price if its above the value of £100. E.G.

If Price = > £100 Then TaxPrice = (20% of £100)

We can also set business rules to make specific data fields required, read-only or hidden.

Workflows

Workflows can be used to automate business process without any user input at all. These workflows are often created within Power Automoate and run in the cloud.

A common use case for workflows is a sales team creating a quote but requiring management approval before its sent to the customer. This can all be automated with a cloud Power Automate flow.

How to access Dataverse

Dataverse is built into Microsofts Power Platform. If you want to access your tables in Dataverse, you can head to make.powerapps.com/entities. If you haven't already got a database in your environment, you can hit Create a Database and you'll soon see your first Dataverse tables!

If you want to use Dataverse for free while learning, you can view this guide on setting up a Power Platform developer environment.

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