- Yooo! - What's up? I'm Adam. - I'm Scott. - And we are gonna talk about Dataverse. What this Dataverse is and why you need to be using it right now. All right, let's do this. (upbeat music) If you're finding us for the first time, be sure to hit that subscribe button to stay up to date with all the videos from both Patrick and myself. Scott, I am so glad you are
here to join me in this video. So for those that don't
know, this is Scott Sewell. He is a PM on the Power BI CAT team. You may have heard us talk
about Power BI CAT before. There's a bunch of great people there just helping large enterprise customers adopt and grow with Power BI, and Scott, you are part
of that magical team. And I know that one of your
passion areas is Dataverse. - Yeah, Dataverse is part
of the Power platform, which Power BI is part of the overall business application platform, but Dataverse is really a data supplier to a lot of the Power platform. It's not a database per se, but it's really a service
that allows you to build as if you're kind of
building on databases, where you're building
your tables, your charts and things like that. You can put it in there and then it layers a layer of security, integration to Azure, AAD, and- (Adam chuckles)
Azure Active Directory. (Adam laughs)
- That's the one. - There we go.
- Thank you. It's easier for you, so yeah. So it builds it. The security is modeled in there and it really serves as that
data layer for Power Apps, Dynamics, and just any kind
of app you wanna build. There's portals and things on top of it. But it's really designed as an easy to use or a quick way to develop
business applications primarily for inside the business. - So I like data. I love data, actually. I have a shirt. You said a word there that is interesting. You said, Dynamics.
- [Scott] Dynamics. Yeah. - [Adam] Do I need Dynamics to use this? - The great thing is this
actually evolved out of Dynamics. And because it's so useful,
Microsoft has made it available. So even if you're not using Dynamics, you can still use that data platform that Dynamics is built on top of. And in fact, a lot of our users, or a lot of our customers
are building applications that have nothing to do with the traditional Dynamics applications, they're building it using
Power Apps on top of Dataverse. It's easier to confuse it. It's not a competitor to Azure SQL. In fact, way down underneath the layers, there is Azure SQL that
this is running on. - All right, Scott, enough
of all this talking. Let's head over to your machine and actually see what this is and play around with it a little bit. - [Scott] Sure. Now I'm gonna open it up inside of Dynamics 365. We're really thinking about what's going on underneath
that front end layer. It's an application that hosts records, in this case, I'm looking
at account records, but they could easily be an inventory or some other type of record that you keep inside of a business. I see it used for in schools, I see it used inside of factories for maintenance types of work. I've seen lots of different use cases where we're just collecting data, managing it inside of Dataverse and exposing it either through Dynamics or through a Power App. One of those things in place. So here's an example. I've just got a list of records here, and, of course, I can drop
into a record and open it up. I've got details about it. Things that you would expect to see. The nice thing is all this
can be configured with no code really as a citizen developer. That's where that sweet
spot is, no code, low code. And as a result, it's actually become very
widely adopted very quickly. So it's been fun to see the
growth of that over the years. - [Adam] All right, so we're in Dynamics. What do I need to do? 'Cause I haven't used
Dynamics, I'll be honest. Don't judge me.
- [Scott] Dynamics is just kind of the face of it, but all its data is
sitting inside a Dataverse. In fact, you can go down below
there and see the tables, the construction of those and the schema. Power Apps is another face of it, but this is that maker portal that configures Dataverse
- [Adam] Awesome. - To support either of those products. So in this case, if you see on the left side,
I've got a data menu here. In fact, in a newer version of this, this actually says Dataverse right there, but you can see that I've got tables. In this case I've got
accounts and addresses and contacts, et cetera. But I could create new tables as I go and begin tracking that in there. And the team that I work in, we use it to track
conversations we're having with some of our enterprise customers, questions they've had or
suggestions they've had about the product, enhancements they would like to see, we're tracking that inside of a Power App. And now all that
information is being stored through the Power App as the front end, but in the back end, it's being
stored inside of Dataverse. - It's just Power Apps
on top of Dataverse, not necessarily having
to use Dynamics at all. Although, I mean, Dynamics is there if you wanna go that
route, it's available. - Dynamics is kind of, we
considered it our first party app. It sits on top of it. Maybe think of it as a big
pre-configured Power App. (Scott chuckles)
- Nice. All right. - With a lot of additional
features, you know. - I'm gonna use that. - It's one way of saying it. Yeah.
(Adam laughs) Nice. All right.
- You know, in this case, I'm looking at the columns and I can see relationships
between tables. I've got business rules that are there. I create views, forms,
all kinds of things, even down to the data itself. As I'm entering this, as I'm working through this, one of the exciting things has been seeing the data that's
being captured and collected and processed in this Dataverse
through the Power Apps or Dynamics and bringing it out
through Power BI, of course. Power BI is amazing way
- Of course, of course. - [Scott] To help business decision makers understand the value of the
data that they're sitting on. In this view that I have in the app. By the way, all this is fake data, but I thought it was just created so I could see some examples going on. - [Adam] I see myself there. - [Scott] (indistinct) here. - [Adam] I'm in opportunity. - [Scott] You're an
opportunity owner. Yeah. - [Adam] Oh, okay, I'm an owner. - [Scott] And you're doing
really well, by the way, I'll show you in your example. - [Adam] I like to hear that. (Adam laughs)
- [Scott] You own a good shot. - [Adam] Nice. - [Scott] I'll talk to
you about next quarters. - [Adam] All right. - [Scott] So anyway. So but in this case, I
can look at the data. I've got some very simple
charts that I can do that are part of the
Dataverse Power App platform. I can do some simple visuals like that, but going beyond that, we started adding additional
integrations with Power BI. You'll notice I've got a new button here, and this one is only in preview. So it's a fairly new button. And I only got it in my
environment, I guess, last week, but I can click this and
choose, visualize this view. It's taking a look at that view that I have in front of me
on the screen and saying, let me create a sort of a
temporary Power BI report on top of that view. It just uses AI to say, let me grab some of the
columns that are in there. - What I like say here in Guy in a Cube is that in relation to DirectQuery, is that auto-generated T-SQL is the best generated T-SQL. In this case.
- Oh, yeah. - The best Power BI report is
the auto-generated Power BI. - Power generated. - It's amazing.
- That's right. - It's bananas.
- Yay, it's exciting. I don't have a catchphrase for us, (Adam laughs)
but we'll do it with that. But I can make some changes
and visualize the data. You can see the columns coming over. I've got charts, I've got suggested texts. Now, one thing is in the current version, as soon as I close the
window it goes away, sort of a femoral at the moment. Possibly future versions will
allow me to say export that or save it as the dashboard-
[Adam] Maybe to a workspace or something.
- My workspace. If you're a Power BI professional, it's important to kind of be
aware that this is happening. Maybe you're involved in a Power App or a Dataverse part of the
business, or maybe not, and you see some people at
the organization using it, be aware that this is an opening for you to be able to step in and provide some leadership
and some service. That's where really you
can bring a lot of value into these organizations. These applications, they are rich in data. The opportunity to turn
it into deeper data or expand it and- Or
just exploring that data and finding those insights
into what's going on. Like that's where Power
BIs really comes in to help with that.
- Yeah, and here's an example of how I see it used
with Dataverse right now, is being able to bring Power BI reports into a Dataverse record
and filter the report according to the context
of the record I'm on. What does that mean? As I go to a record and we
jump onto A. Datum Corp, I'll open up the record in
Dataverse and I'm looking at it, I've got the values from Dataverse, but I've also added this analytics tab. And in the analytics tab, I can bring in a Power BI report and I filtered the report to A. Datum. So imagine if you're looking
at records in your system and I can go to multiple systems, pull all those Power BI reports that are scattered across
multiple workspaces, multiple models, pull those together inside the
record for a single account, makes that account much, much more rich in terms of 360 degree view. It's kind of like a
navigation tool to say, we've created all these reports for you, but instead of having
to go into each report and refilter it, we should bring them all
together in multiple tabs in these entities. - You're bringing that report to the user in the
application they're using without them having to switch context and go back over to Power BI. So that's powerful and that helps. The other thing that's interesting there is you could even craft that report to be more like the application. So instead of having
like a separate header and all that in the report, just make it look like it's
just part of the application and user doesn't even need
to know it's Power BI. - The data that's in here can be data from any
system that's out there. Anything that you can connect Power BI to. So it's really a powerful way of bringing the data to the user as opposed to making them go find it. - This is nice. I'm getting excited about this. So for someone just watching this, like you've already
got data set up, right? You've already got the report,
you got everything going. How does someone just
get started with this? What's the starting point? - [Scott] The great thing is because it's all part
of the Power platform, it's really easy to get
started between the two. When I go into Power BI. In fact, if you've opened up Power BI in the last several months, you've noticed up in the ribbon, there is a Dataverse button. It's a link directly to Dataverse just like we can connect to SQL or Power BI data sets or Excel. If I open that, it's gonna
establish a connection and point out all the Dataverse tenants that I have permission to see. I can pick one and go ahead
and bring that data in. - [Adam] Yeah, and then
it's just normal Power BI at that point, right? - [Scott] Yeah. (indistinct) Power BI. - [Adam] 'Cause we've
connected to the data. So now we can shape it in Power Query and we can model it if
we need to model it, bring it alongside other
data if we're importing and then create that report on top of it. Does it allow for DirectQuery as well or? - Great question, Adam. I mentioned before, Dataverse
has this really rich and complex security models
tied to the AD account. It has raw level security and everything. Well, instead of having to rebuild that, you can just use the Dataverse connection and do a DirectQuery against it. That's only been available
in the last year or so. That's really appropriate for those, I'm gonna call them smaller data sets. Once you get up into
the millions of records or even hundreds and hundreds of thousands of records scenario. Inside of Dataverse, we've got a new magic button
called Azure synapse link. Dataverse now has this link that synchronizes that to a data warehouse so I can consume it through
synapse if I wanted to. - [Adam] Nice. Now we're leveraging the
power of synapse and Power BI and everything together? - Yeah. The nice thing is it gives you that no cliffs experience, where you can do small data sets or you can do large data sets, or ginormous enterprise
data sets (mumbles) - Helps you scale. helps you scale. Scott, any limitations
that you wanna call out, just pitfalls that people may run into that you want them to be aware of.
- Yeah. Sure. Dataverse has by default, because it has a lot of
stuff pre-built for you, there's a lot of fields. Some of the out of the box field entities can have upwards of 1000 fields. - You don't wanna do that. - Now, (both chuckle)
you don't wanna do that. So my first step in a report is always, when I go into the transform data, I'm always going up and saying, choose my columns just so that I choose to pull only the columns that I
wanna to pull into the report and leave all the rest of them behind. That's an important first step. The second important step, and that's gonna be whether
you are doing DirectQuery or import. As a Power BI professional, you don't wanna try to pull
in like long text rings, like bodies of emails. Those are just not
necessarily appropriate. The other thing to be aware of is Dataverse has the schema that's built as a relational data model. It's got all these interconnections. That's not the model that
works best for Power BI. What we wanna do is work with the folks
on the Dataverse side and help them translate what they're doing into a star schema. - [Adam] Yes. - It's a bit of a struggle. I mean, I came from the Dataverse side and I kept resisting the star schema. I kept fighting against it.
(Adam chuckles) My first reports, I just
tried to dump everything plus the kitchen sink into my report. Bad, bad, bad.
- [Adam] Bad idea. - Yeah, bad idea. The expertise you have
as a Power BI person, you need to be able to use that and think of how you can
bring that expertise forward and help somebody from the Dataverse side translate the data and the
questions that they have into a model that you
can build in Power BI. - Love it. Love it. - I'm really interested in seeing, if you're using Power BI with Dataverse, or you've got people using Power Apps, have you connected the two together? I'd love to know what you're doing and what you've heard so far. If you don't mind, just
leave a comment below and let me know what's going on. - If you liked this video, be sure to hit that big thumbs up button. Smash it if you so desire. If it's your first time here, hit that subscribe button. And as always, from both
myself, Patrick and Scott, thank you so much for watching. Keeping awesome, and we'll
see you in the next video.
