Microsoft Dataverse Intro in 20 Minutes #Dataverse

hey everyone april here welcome back to my channel where we talk all things microsoft 365 and the power platform a lot of you all commented on my sharepoint intro video that i did a while back thanking me for the video and requesting that i do the same thing for dataverse so today we're going to do a quick overview of what microsoft dataverse is and how it works all that coming up right after this so what is microsoft databurst well it's a cloud-based low-code data service and application platform this was formerly referred to as the common data service or cds so if in some of my old videos or any other of the power platform youtuber's old videos you hear them mention cds or common data service that is the same thing as dataverse it's just given a new name and rebranded and dataverse gives us a way to structure a variety of data and business logic to support interconnected applications and processes dataverse is managed and maintained by microsoft so this is a data service that you don't have to worry about the maintenance of dataverse is available globally and can be deployed geographically as well to comply with any potential data residency requirements and an important distinction here with dataverse to make here is it's not like access this is not something that is designed to be used standalone on a server you need to have an internet connection to access dataverse so what is dataverse designed to do well it's meant to be the central repository for our business data theater versus actually what powers a lot of the dynamics 365 solutions like field service customer service and all that and of course if you've watched my channel at all or any of the other power platform channels then you know that dataverse is also what powers the entire power platform like powerapps power automates bi and power virtual agents so if you're using the power platform right now you're actually already using dataverse in some capacity dataverse is also utilized by ai builder and powerapps portals as well so now that we understand a very high level of what dataverse is and what is designed to do and where we would actually use it with the power platform and dynamics and all of that let's take a step back and see everything that dataverse can do because it is more than just a database i probably have been guilty of this as well when we're talking about you know building power apps for example and what data sources we can use you know we throw in sharepoint and excel and sql and dataverse and sometimes it makes it appear that dataverse is just a database but it's really important to point out that it's much more than a database it's an application platform so this visual really kind of highlight everything that it can do and it's important to highlight that dataverse is api first everything that we're doing in dataverse is actually creating an api and these are the same apis that we consume in our power platform services but also additionally we can consume in our custom applications that we create in visual studio for example immediately below this we have a security layer side of dataverse dataverse actually handles its authentication with azure active directory this allows us to bring conditional access and multi-factor authentication to dataverse to secure it so we're able to ensure that the right people see the data and that we can audit that access along the way and the cool thing is this security not only applies to the dataverse level itself but also the individual columns and rows of our data which will explain more what that means here in a second beyond the security layer we have the logic layer we're actually able to apply business logic at the data layer what that means is regardless of how a user is interacting with the data the same rules can apply so this can be things like workflows duplicate detection and business rules which we'll talk a little bit about later on now we're getting into the heart of dataverse which is the data layer now although it's more than just a database data is a big part of what we can do with dataverse so it gives us a way to structure our complex business data without having to write code because it is a low code platform so within the data layer here in dataverse we can discover model validate and report off of our data next we have the storage layer dataverse is a relational database and all of our physical data in dataverse is stored in the azure cloud so that means we don't have to worry about where our data lives and we're ensured that it's scalable and it can handle all kinds of data from relational data but it also supports file and blob storage log files data lake and semi-structured data and lastly we have the integration layer more commonly than not we're wanting to integrate with other systems when we're using a database like this or a data platform so of course dataverse offers a rich integration layer where we can seamlessly interact with other systems we can do this for things like event hub service buses web hooks exporting to excel sql and data lake now that we understand everything that's going on behind the scenes now let's go into the details of the data layer in the data layer we have these things called databases and that's just an instance of dataverse storage you've probably heard the term database before if you've used other databases say like sql server or even access these databases give us a way to store data and how we do that is with something called tables that's how we structure our data inside of a database in a table all that is is a logical set of rows that we use to store data so again think access sql server or even excel in those tables we have rows and those rows contain many different columns to manage pieces of information that we might store about an item in the row and we can have multiple of these databases inside of dataverse when we're talking about tables where we actually store our data there are two main types of tables that we need to be aware about for dataverse the first is standard tables these are our base set of tables that are created whenever we create a new database inside of dataverse these are tables that dataverse relies on to do its thing so we can't delete these tables and we can't delete the standard columns that are included in these tables but we are able to utilize them and add additional columns to customize them a bit that way we also have something called complex tables these tables traditionally contain business logic like workflows plugins and things like that so if we need to create any custom tables then we can create those with the complex table type now in those tables we mentioned we have columns and that's how we actually store pieces of information so because so many of us use excel i like to keep paralleling to how excel works in excel we have a workbook we can have tables in excel and we can define the columns in there and store data within rows and excel so very similar concept here with dataverse in dataverse though we do have to define what type of data are we storing in a given column so when we create columns inside of a dataverse table we have to choose what type of data that is in the column is going to be for example datetime is it going to be number single line of text choice so we have to define what type of data is going to be stored in that when setting up these columns and we can't talk about tables and columns and databases and all that without talking about relationships and when i introduced dataverse from the beginning i mentioned that it was a relational database so what do we mean by that well to best explain this let's talk through a scenario say we want to create a system to manage sales orders well to do that we're going to need to track a few pieces of information first we're obviously going to need somewhere to store information about the products that we're selling then we probably need to have some kind of way to store information about who we're selling those products to who are our customers then when we give customers a way to order products we're going to need to be able to generate and store information about invoices and those invoices should contain information about line items of what products that customers ordering now this is a fairly complex system now why we could store all of this information technically inside of a single table in a database in dataverse that's probably not the most efficient way it's going to get a little bit messy this would be best done by utilizing relationships and to do that what we can do is we can make each one of these a separate table inside of a dataverse database we can have a customers table of products and invoices and align items and we can define a relationship between a customer and an invoice in an invoice in a line item and a line item with a product when we're talking about relationships there are a few main type of relationships that we can create in dataverse that we need to be aware of the first is one-to-many what this means is table a can be associated with more than one row in table b but each row in table b can only match one row in table a now more real life example of this would be a class for students would have a single classroom then we have mini to one obviously the opposite of one to many so each row in table b can match more than one row in table a but each row in table a can only match one row in table b the real life example of this would be one single teacher teaches many classes and finally we have many to many each row in table a can match more than one row in table b and vice versa the real life example of this is students can attend many classes and each class can have many students so now we should have a good understanding of how data is physically stored inside of the databases in tables with columns and relationships now let's take a step back and talk about something called environments because when we're using dataverse we're commonly using that to build power platform solutions with and to be able to do that we have to use something called environments because that's what gives us a way to store and manage the business solutions that we create in the power platform these environments are created under an azure active directory tenant which means they can only be accessed by users within the tenant now similar to what we talked about earlier with dataverse these environments as well are bound to a particular geographic location so when you go and set up the environment you choose what location it should be tied to like the united states or europe or canada and when you do that that gets passed down to the databases that you create with dataverse inside of that environment so if i define my environment to be in the united states region that means that database that is created and associated with it will be created in data centers tied to that region we can create multiple environments in our tenant for the power platform so kind of like you're seeing here we can have an environment for usa we can have one for canada and we can have one for australia but within these individual environments we can only have one daniverse database per environment now earlier i mentioned the logic layer of dataverse and how we can apply something called business rules let's dive into what business rules are exactly these business rules give us a way to apply business logic at the data layer instead of the application layer which really means if we create a business rule in dataverse it's in effect regardless of where we're actually interacting with the data and these business rules are used to do things like setting default values validating data showing error messages and showing our hiding columns those are some really common use cases of business rules and we can use those in our canvas and our model driven applications and again the benefit being we can do what we're seeing here we can have a business rule that says for example check if the field credit limit is over a thousand dollars and if so whether we're using this in a canvas app or a model driven app i want to set this field called business required to vp approval so that we get that approval for that if it's over that amount and lastly let's talk about how do we actually administer and set up dataverse to use well we do that with the power platform admin center which we can get to by going to admin.powerplatform.com this is kind of our one-stop shop and where we're going to go to manage and administer this and do things like creating those environments and creating the databases within the environments we can also do things in here like setting up data policies for data loss prevention and security which i cover in some of my other videos on the channel setting up data integrations and monitoring our licenses and our quotas for our databases so here we are in the power platform admin center and you see the default tab is our environments tab and we can see all of the different environments that we currently have inside of my tenant here when we're using the power platform everyone gets a default environment so that's what we're seeing here this is the name of my tenant in quotes with default there we can't delete this default environment but we can customize it and rename it if we like but everyone gets that and this environment does have a dataverse database associated with it we also have several different other environments so we create a new environment by clicking on the new tab here and this is where the region settings are applied so we can see i can choose my default region or any of these other regions and when i choose this setting this gets passed down to dataverse to the database so that the database there is provision in the appropriate data center in that region i can go to the powerapps site at make.powerapps.com and this is where we can actually see the tables inside of our dataverse databases now these are tied to environments so i do have to keep in mind what environment i'm actually in when i am inside of the powerapp site here so if i want to see databases and tables that i've created in my april dynamo environment i want to make sure that i'm in that here and switched over but then on the left hand side we can expand out this data tab and here you'll see tables so we have the one database that's associated with this april dunham environment and we can see that i have multiple tables associated with this database and you'll see two types here we have standard and custom now again standard being those are the ones that come out of the box anytime that you create a new dataverse database those are the ones that we can't delete but we can add columns to and then we have custom those are all the additional tables that we have came in here and selected new table and we went through and added our own custom tables now to do that we just give our table a name here and a display name and a primary column and that will go through and set up a brand new table for us and you can see i set up quite a few different tables one for example is called events so i can click on that and when we select the table we can see all the columns that we have with the table and one thing to point out here as well when you create a brand new table from scratch you'll see quite a few columns be created by default so we have some standard columns that again we can't and don't want to delete that come included with our tables that we create to do things like track who created the table who last modified it who the original author is some status and things like that we can add columns by clicking the add a column and in the data type section that's where we would choose the type of data that we would be storing in this column and you can see that it supports many different data types from text we even have types for email to enforce that someone enters in a valid email address or phone number stock ticker symbols and down here you see how we can support files and images even with our column types so lots of different options that we have here and different types of data that we can support again making this a really compelling choice as opposed to something like excel or sharepoint which isn't quite as robust and the type of fields that it supports and if we look across here here are the other things that we can configure we talked about relationships earlier we have this special relationships tab where we can associate and define any relationship so in my case i have a table called events and i have another table called sessions so one event might contain multiple sessions so i can actually go in here and see add a relationship and there are those different relationship types that i just explained earlier so i could say for this it could be a one to many so i'm in the events table so one event could be associated to many and i can choose in my drop down here the table that i want to create the relationship with so if i scroll down here i should have a table called session so i can select that and then below what this is going to do is actually create a column to create the associated lookup too so it's going to create a new lookup column called events so that i can tie a session to a particular event and then all i have to do is click done and save table and this will actually go apply and create that lookup for me we also have a special tab as you're seeing here for business rules so this is where we could go and configure any of those business rules that we have here and then just looking across all the other tabs here we have these things called views it's really similar to sharepoint how we have the concept of views there and how we can filter what columns show in a particular view so we have all these default views that are created for us when we initially create the table and we have the ability to go into any one of these views and it will take us to a screen that looks like this where we can configure what columns we want to show in this view so on the left hand side here we'll show all of our different columns i could just drag and drop and place into the screen on the right the column that i want to show and build out my view this way so i'll drag in some details here and then when you're done we'll just click save and publish and now we've just built out our view and of course we can do things as well like changing what we sort and filter the view by down below here on the right hand side we also have a forms tab so when we create these tables in dataverse we have an input form that is created for us to be able to add new information into our table so those forms are stored here on the forms tab and if we want to override one we can go into the form it'll take us again to an edit experience where we can choose what fields we want to show in their particular form so this is going to go and load here it's going to show what i have right now on this form and so far i'm only displaying the name we can click the table columns button in the left hand pane and that's going to show all the table columns similar to what we saw in our view edit screen and we can just drag and drop the different fields that we want to be able to input into this form once i have all that over here we can click save and publish and that will update our corresponding forms in the data tab if we go over to that this is where we can actually see what data has been submitted inside of our database in dataverse so if i were to go right now and add a new record for example it's going to take me to a brand new input form i can see all those fields we just added so let's create a new event for the powerful devs conference see we'll put a big number in here and save and close and now you'll see there in our data tab we have that information surfaced up here alright that's all that i have for you today if you found this video helpful please do me a favor and support my channel by giving it a big thumbs up and hitting that subscribe button thanks and i'll catch you the next video you

Channel: April Dunnam

Views: 5,771

Rating: 4.96 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft Dataverse Intro, microsoft dataverse, what is dataverse, microsoft dataverse tutorial, what is microsoft dataverse, common data service, power platform, power apps, dynamics 365, dataverse power platform, dataverse, relational database, database relationships, how to use dataverse, intro to dataverse, dataverse power apps, dataverse tutorial, dataverse vs sharepoint, dataverse for beginners, dataverse overview, microsoft dataverse overview, April Dunnam

Id: C1DJlmrZn5M

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021