Finding the best Data Source in Power BI – Part III
If you haven’t already, make sure to start with Part I and Part II where I explore OneDrive and Live Connect, and set the baseline on how to measure “best” connector type in Power BI.
Part I- https://bilingualanalytics.com.au/data-connectors-onedrive/
Part II- https://bilingualanalytics.com.au/data-connectors-live-connect-power-bi-dataset
Dataverse
Today I am going to share with you my experience with Dataverse.
Dataverse is the connection point between Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. But it is not limited to Dynamics 365 users.
In a sense, it provides the underlying dataset for all those beautiful low-code/no-code applications that users create within the organization.
The Pros
It provides great flexibility when it comes to accessing all the data generated by the Power Platform.
Additionally, the fact that those Dataverse Databases are auto-generated for the users with all the database musts, is a huge benefit.
However, looking at it in its current stage from a Business Analyst perspective, the pros probably stop there…
Limitations and Issues
One of the biggest limitations of Dataverse is the size of the dataset it can access. If the size exceeds 80MB – which is ridiculously small – Power BI report creators have to use the Common Data Service (Legacy) connector.
While at first 80MB might seem acceptable, please keep in mind, that users don’t have the option to ONLY get the fields they need.
It also means, that when I accessed my Channel dimension table (2 columns and 3 rows), the export contained 25+ columns. All those “created by”, “updated by”, etc columns…
Additionally, as a guideline, Microsoft flags a data retrieval rate of approximately 500 rows per second for the Dataverse connector.
Enterprise-scale reporting
With these limitations in mind, it is obvious that Dataverse shouldn’t be used for large-scale reporting.
BUT, it doesn’t mean that in the long run, it cannot get better.
I have a feeling that Microsoft has some plans with Dataverse and some of these limitations will go away.
Then it could potentially be much more powerful.
In the meantime, it is a great solution for citizen developers to create a low code, no code application with a decent database automatically created at the back end of the application.
And maybe that is where Microsoft drew the line for the current implementation of Dataverse
More details
If you would like to hear a bit more details about Dataverse, and are interested in why I said all the above, make sure to watch the video below.
Even if it took me quite some time to record this one, I am glad that I have some exposure to Dataverse.
Roland
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