What is Microsoft Dataverse?: A comprehensive overview

While the concept of Microsoft Dataverse isn’t new, it continues to expand its applications and is becoming increasingly popular with businesses. Dataverse offers a scalable and secure environment for data storage and management. In this article, we’ll look into what Microsoft Dataverse is, its pricing plans, key features and how you can benefit from using this solution.

Jump to:

• What is Microsoft Dataverse?
• Microsoft Dataverse pricing
• The two versions of Microsoft Dataverse
• Features and capabilities of Microsoft Dataverse
• Why use Microsoft Dataverse?
• More than just a database

What is Microsoft Dataverse?

Microsoft Dataverse, previously known as Common Data Service, is a cloud-based data management solution that allows users to manage data used by business applications. It’s part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which is used to automate workflows and create custom business applications and data analytics. The role of Microsoft Dataverse in the Power Platform ecosystem is to provide a structured and secure data storage and data management platform.

Microsoft Dataverse pricing

Pay-as-you-go plan

This plan is priced at $120 per active user per app per month. You need a Microsoft Azure subscription to pay. The pay-as-you-go plan is ideal for businesses that want the flexibility and agility to pay only when they run an app during a monthly period.

Subscription plan

The subscription plan is best suited for businesses that need predictable user-based licensing. Subscription plans are available in two formats:

• Per app plan: $5 per user per app per month. You get one app per user. This plan includes 250 AI Builder service credits per month.
• Per user plan: Flat monthly fee of $20 for unlimited apps per user. This plan includes 500 AI Builder service credits per month.

The two versions of Microsoft Dataverse

Users of Microsoft Teams have access to Database for Teams platform, which is specially designed for creating workflows and apps within the Teams application. However, with Microsoft Dataverse for Teams, you don’t get access to some advanced features available in Microsoft Dataverse. This includes tools such as managed data lakes, non-relational storage or advanced data types. Similarly, you don’t have access to some business intelligence tools such as API access, plug-ins, and data visualization.

There are also differences in the environment; Dataverse for Teams limits you to one environment per team, whereas Dataverse gives you unlimited environments. Dataverse for Teams is also missing some advanced security and integration tools such as server-side sync, activity logging and field-level security.

Features and capabilities of Microsoft Dataverse

Availability

Microsoft Dataverse offers service availability of 99.9% uptime, which is sufficient for enterprise-level operations. The solution has built-in entitlement limits to ensure optimum service quality and availability. Entitlement limits are the number of requests a user can make in a specified time period. The solution also has automatic detection of malicious behavior to minimize disruptions to service.

Security

As Dataverse is built on Microsoft Azure, it inherits a comprehensive set of data security features. In addition, you get a granular level of access management configuration. This helps set up user access for different business units and users.

Capacity add-ons

In a situation where a business needs additional capacity, they can purchase additional requests through the capacity add-on feature. Each add-on offers an additional 10,000 requests per day. You also have the option of purchasing multiple capacity add-ons.

Analytics

With Microsoft Dataverse you unlock several types of reports and analytics tools to gain valuable insights. Using these tools, you can create charts, tables, interactive dashboards and reports. There is also an AI builder that helps automate processes. The AI builder is easy to use and requires little to no coding.

Why use Microsoft Dataverse?

In this age of technology, data has become the center of everything a business does. It provides data-driven insights for informed decision-making and business planning. While data is extremely useful, it needs to be captured, stored, analyzed and presented in a way that is useful. With Microsoft Dataverse, you get the infrastructure to make this possible. You can also create virtual tables to connect business data with Power Platform.

It’s more than a typical database management system, such as Access or SQL Server. Although the user interface looks similar, it offers a lot more functionality. For example, it offers centralized data management, integration with other Microsoft Power Platform applications, data security and compliance, and more.

Businesses can use Dataverse to build custom applications, automate workflows, and perform low-code app development. It also leverages Microsoft’s robust compliance and security infrastructure. You get secure data access with comprehensive data control policies and data loss measures.

More than just a database

With its impressive set of features, scalable pricing plans and integration capabilities with Microsoft Power Platform applications, Microsoft Dataverse could be a game changer for businesses. The customization tools mean a business can tailor the solution according to their needs, making it work for a variety of use cases.