Dynamics 365: Learn in doing

<for my reference only: O25 = October 2025; DE3 = with Data Entity Tag;>   When working with data in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations , one of the most useful skills is knowing where your data lives - which table or data entity holds the field you’re looking at. Why? Because this knowledge unlocks so many possibilities: Extracting data for analysis. Mass updates through Data Management . Building integrations or troubleshooting issues. Think of it as peeking behind the curtain to understand the architecture that powers your forms. Why This Matters Here’s a little reality check: Different fields on the same form can belong to different tables . A single field can appear in multiple data entities . And not all users have equal access - System Admins have the most visibility (SysTableBrowser, entity lists, etc.). So, if you’ve ever wondered “Where does this field actually come from?” , the below could guide you. Part 1: How to Find the Table Name for a Form Field Ope...

 <for my reference only: O25 = October 2025; DE2 = with Data Entity Tag;> While scrolling through LinkedIn, I stumbled upon something that made me happy and I think it will make your life easier too if you work with Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations . We all know the data model in D365FO can feel like a maze sometimes. Tables, relationships, inheritance - it’s powerful, but not always easy to visualize. That’s why these two tools shared by a fellow community member may make it a bit more easy for us. 1. D365 F&O Table Relation Schema https://daxonline.org/d365/entity-relation-schema.html This tool generates a DBML schema for the area you select and lets you instantly visualize the data model. Perfect for: Getting a clear overview of how tables connect. Documenting your work for future reference. Sharing diagrams with your team (you can render DBML using https://dbdiagram.io ). When I quickly tested it with CustTable and related tables like CustParameters , CustSet...

<for my reference only: O25 = October 2025; DE1 = Data Entity Tag;> What's a Data Entity (really)? A Data Entity is a business‑friendly view over one or more normalized tables (e.g., CustTable , addresses, contacts), packaged so you can import/export, integrate, and evolve with less pain when the underlying schema changes. Think: one door, many rooms behind it . Entities can also be exposed as OData (for APIs) and used by the Data Management Framework (DMF) for bulk import/export. Heads‑up: F&O does not allow direct T‑SQL against the prod DB. Entities (and BYOD) exist to keep you safe and supported. When should I create my own entity? You need a clean shape for integration—not ten joins. You plan to expose an API (OData) for a specific business concept. You want DMF import/export (files, recurring jobs, mapping) without writing plumbing. Step‑by‑step: Create an entity for Item Serial Numbers Example scenario: Export/import item serial numbers from the InventSerial...

We are living in a Digital world where Data is everything and the Ability to process and generate insights to enable Business decision making is the absolute super power you want to have. And in order to process data into meaningful information, it might be a good practice to have a place to store all kinds of data - and Microsoft provides one such storage service with Azure Data lake .  So What is Azure Data Lake Storage?  Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) can be literally compared to a large lake/pond, where rain water passing through various terrains gets collected. Irrespective of whether a water stream passing through fields is muddy (or) a water stream passing through a cluster of rocks is clean - a lake would take in the water as it comes.  Just like that ADLS can be considered as a repository that has capacity to hold large amounts of data in their native, raw format.  Data lake storages can be terabytes and petabytes in size. Data can come from multiple heterog...

If you have ever worked with a Data warehousing solution, you would probably say that the most important part of the job is to ensure proper Data ingestion (Data loading). If you lose any data at this point, then the resulting information (reports) will end up inaccurate, failing to represent the facts on which Business decisions are made. Microsoft Azure provides several services which you can use to ingest data and one of them is Azure Data Factory. So What is Azure Data Factory?  Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a Platform-as-a-Service offering from Microsoft. The primary purpose of this service could be to do Extract, Transform and Load (ETL)  or Extract, Load and Transform (ELT) and this is done via using a concept pipelines. Two types of pipelines to begin with - data movement pipelines (Extract & Load) and also data transformation pipelines (Transform). And being a PaaS service, ADF automatically scales out based on the demand enforced using these pipelines. ADF is ...

First post in year 2020, I am surprised by myself that I haven't managed to make a single post this year - given that I am, like most of you, working from home for the majority of the year.  Anyways, here comes a small tip about Copying Databases. With Dynamics 365 for Finance and operations (now a.k.a Dynamics 365 for Finance, Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management and also Dynamics 365 for Commerce) - you might be in need to perform several database operations during the Project implementation phases. Also you might want to take a back up of the existing database for recovery perspective.  Below is something which I use to support with Copy actions on databases. How to make a quick copy of AXDB hosted in Azure SQL (Tier 2 and above) To begin connect to the Azure SQL database from within the primary AOS server (AOS 01 - because this is where you would great maximum permissions to perform actions on SQL database) You should use the credentials from LCS to connect to Az...