Dynamics 365: Learn in doing

In this blog, I am just trying to summarize some key topics regarding the Data residency and options available with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (ERP) in one place. This is considerable a big topic and I personally don't have too much experience working with On Prem implementations, myself - so including Microsoft links as much as I can. Hope this helps :)  So, Where Does Microsoft Store Data for D365FO? Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (D365FO) is a cloud-based ERP solution hosted on Microsoft Azure datacenters . When you deploy an environment, you select a region (geo) , and Microsoft ensures that your customer data at rest stays within that region. For European customers, this means data is stored in EU-based Azure regions like West Europe or North Europe . Microsoft may replicate data within the same geo for durability, but not outside it - there are always exceptions for rare cases like troubleshooting or legal compliance. But then Microsoft...

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 ...

When working with Dynamics 365 Finance and operations implementations, it is an obvious step to perform database movements across environments. We have been doing this in the previous version (AX2012) as well, where we had to change the environments related settings after the database copy manually. Now we D365FO , we might end up in different scenarios based on the Tier-level of the environment . So I have tried to identify the #4 major scenarios in here and share the approach I have used.  Copy of DB from Tier 1 env. to another Tier 1 env. Copy of DB from Tier 1 env. to a Tier 2 env. Copy of DB from Tier 2 env. to another Tier 2 env. Copy of DB from Tier 2 env. to a Tier 1 env. The below picture is an illustration of different types and corresponding solutions on a high level (sorry for my not-so-good-handwriting 😅) #1 Tier 1 -> Tier 1 DB copy:   This scenario can happen quite common if you have multiple tier-1 environment in your on-going project li...