What is Azure Data Lake in D365 f&O

What is Azure Data Lake?

Microsoft Azure Data Lake is a technology in Azure cloud that enables big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). When this topic mentions "Data Lake," it's referring specifically to storage technology that is based on Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.

Data lakes provide cloud storage that is less expensive than the cloud storage that relational databases provide. Therefore, large amounts of data can be stored in the cloud. This data includes both business data that is traditionally stored in business systems and data warehouses, device and sensor data, such as signals from devices. In addition, Data Lake supports a range of tools and programming languages that enable large amounts of data to be reported on, queried, and transformed.

Dynamics 365 products, such as Finance and Operations apps, use Data Lake for AI and analytics scenarios. Therefore, customers can take advantage of the strengths and cost advances that this technology offers. The following sections provide an overview of the scenarios.

Data Lake combines BYOD and Entity store

Customers use a combination of analytical workspaces (which are based on Entity store) and BYOD for different scenarios. Following table compares the scenarios and capabilities

DATA LAKE COMBINES BYOD AND ENTITY STORE

Analytical workspaces built-on Entity store	Data warehouse with Bring your own DB (BYOD)
Near real-time Operational Analytics (with embedded Power BI)	Data warehouse with PowerBI.com or other tools
Reporting on data from F&O	Mash-up F&O data with other data sources
Ready-made reports shipped with F&O or ISV solution	Reports extended or authored by partner

Reports authored with both these sources can be pinned into Analytical workspaces in F&O with contextual security and drill thru actions Data Lake combines both these services into a single service that offers the "best of both worlds":

• Because Data Lake is included in customer subscriptions, you can bring your own data lake and integrate it with Finance and Operations apps. Finance and Operations apps will use your data lake to store Entity store data and operate analytical workspaces. Analytical workspaces continue to work as they worked before.

• Entity store is staged in your data lake and provides a set of simplified (denormalized) data structures to make reporting easier. Your users can now be given direct access to the data that is most relevant to them, and they can create their own reports by using a tool of their choice.

• Instead of exporting data by using BYOD, customers can select the data that is staged in the data lake. Data feed service, which is part of Finance and Operations services, keeps the data in the data lake fresh.

• You can bring your own data into the data lake to supplement the data that Finance and Operations apps provide. This capability allows for easy data mash-up scenarios in the data lake.

  • Data from external sources can easily be ingested into the data lake via hundreds of ready-made connectors that are available in tools such as Power BI dataflows and Azure Data Factory.
  • Historical data and earlier data that is often inherited as a part of the transition to Finance and Operations apps can be ingested directly into the data lake.
  • Data lakes provide options for ingesting non-business data. For example, device data can easily be ingested into the data lake.

• Cloud-based services let both power users and developers consume this data.

  

This post have been taken from https://docs.microsoft.com/.