Data Warehousing: Architecture (Part VI: Building a Data Lakehouse for Dynamics 365 Environments with Serverless SQL Pool)

Data Warehousing Series

One of the major limitations of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the lack of direct access to the production databases for reporting purposes via standard reporting or ETL/ELT tools. Of course, one can attempt to use OData-based solutions though they don't scale with the data volume and imply further challenges. 

At the beginning, Microsoft attempted to address this limitation by allowing the export of data entities into customer's Azure SQL database, feature known as bring your own database (BYOD). Highly dependent on batch jobs, the feature doesn't support real-time synchronization and composite entities, and is dependent on the BYOD's database capacity, the scalability after a certain point becoming a bottleneck.

Then Microsoft started to work on two solutions for synchronizing the Dynamics 365 data in near-real time (cca. 10-30 minutes) to the Data Lake: the Export to Data Lake add-in (*), respectively the Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with Azure Data Lake. The former allows the synchronization of the tables from Finance & Operations (doesn't work for CRM) to files that reflect the database model from the source. In exchange, the latter allows the synchronization of data entities to similar structures, and probably will support tables as well. Because the service works via Dataverse it supports also the synchronization of CRM data. 

The below diagram depicts the flow of data from the D365 environments to the Data Lake, the arrow indicating the direction of the flow. One arrow could be drawn between Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations and the Azure Link for Datavetse service, though one may choose to use only the Export to Data Lake add-in given that a data model based on the tables offers more flexibility (in the detriment of effort though). Data from other systems can be exported via pipelines to the Data Lake to provide an integrated and complete view of the business. 

Serverless Data Lakehouse

Once the data available in the Delta Lake, it can be consumed directly by standard and Power BI paginated reports, however building the data model will involve considerable effort and logic duplication between reports. Therefore, it makes sense to prepare the data upfront in the Data Lake, when possible, and here the serverless SQL pool can help building an enterprise data model. The former approach can still be used for rapid prototyping or data discovery. 

The serverless SQL Server pool is a stateless SQL-based distributed data processing query service over Azure data lake for large-scale data and computational functions. Even if it doesn't support standard tables, it allows to make the data from the Data Lakes files available for processing via external tables, a mechanism that maps files' structure to an entity that can be queried like a normal view (though it supports only read operations). 

Further on, the enterprise data model can be built like in a normal Data Warehouse via the supported objects (views, stored procedures and table-valued functions). These objects can be called from standard and Power BI paginated reports, the queries being processed at runtime anew, which might result occasionally in poor performance. However, the architecture is supposed to scale automatically as needed.

If further performance is needed, parts of the logic or the end-result can be exported to the Data Lake and here the Medallion Architecture should be considered when appropriate. Upon case, further processing might be needed to handle the limitations of the serverless SQL pool (e.g.flattening hierarchies, handling data quality issues).

One can go around the lack of standard table support needed especially for value mappings by storing the respective data as files and/or occasionally by misusing views, respectively by generating Spark tables via the Spark pool. 

Note:
(*) Existing customers have until 1-Nov-2024 to transition from Export to Data lake to Synapse link. Microsoft advises new customers to use Synapse Link.

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