Finance and Operations entities in a customer's data lake
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
| Enabled for | Public preview | General availability |
|---|---|---|
| End users by admins, makers, or analysts |  Sep 30, 2020 |
- |
Business value
This feature enables customers to reduce their reliance on and eventually retire the use of Bring your own database (BYOD). Access to Data Entity definitions in Azure Data Lake enables customers to retire BYOD service without changing their downstream integrations.
Customers upgrading from Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 and Dynamics AX 2012 who have their existing data warehouses integrated into operational databases can now upgrade to Finance and Operations apps with minimal disruptions to their existing integrations with access to Table level data. With the addition of Entity shapes, business users can easily consume the data without having to understand underlying table definitions and relationships.
Feature details
Entities in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations apps are now available within your own Azure Data Lake, allowing you to choose the required entities. The system identifies the underlying tables and keeps the corresponding data refreshed on a near real-time basis. By using the Entity definition metadata available in the data lake, customers can query the Entity shape using Azure Synapse. Customers can also stage the Entity within the data lake.
There is no need to monitor and manage export jobs or schedules. Power users and developers can use a variety of tools and languages to access data within their own data lake, including DataFlows, Spark, and SQL. By using Azure Synapse, you can get access to entity data as SQL view definitions.
Note
This feature is in limited preview and might not be available in all regions and environments supported by Finance and Operations apps. If you are unable to find the Export to Azure Data Lake functionality in Lifecycle Services (LCS) or your Finance and Operations apps, this feature is not currently available in your environment. Refer to the documentation for availability information, and to join previews.