Week 3 Summary

In this module, we looked at managing data on the power platform. Duplicate detection is a commonly requested feature in database applications to help keep data clean. As users are creating record, they may not be aware that the record they’re creating already exists in the system. The out-of-the-box duplicate detection functionality is designed to alert the user to potential duplicates when they create or update records interactively in model driven apps. They could also be run a system jobs in the background to find potential duplicates for the administrator to review. Once these rules get set up, you can create duplicate detection jobs to periodically run and check for duplicates. For our hands-on activity here, we built some duplicate detection rules.

We discussed data imports, along with some considerations and challenges that go along with importing data. There are numerous options for import, including using Power Query, using import was from Classic Web Experience, and using a third-party tool. When using the Import Wizard, data will be imported from Excel files or CSV files either through Dynamics 365 templates, as you see the path here in our image, or from Excel worksheets. For our hands-on, we completed the Power Query import.

There are a number of options for exporting data. Exporting to Microsoft Excel from within Model driven apps, exporting to Microsoft Excel from web.powerapps.com, using Microsoft Flow to create a CSV or Excel file, or configuring the export of data to SQL Azure. For our hands-on here, we exported the data we had just recently imported.

And Power Query is a tool that enables us to use a wide range of data sources, transform the data, and allows data loading to existing entities or creating as part of an import.

Bulk delete is exactly what it implies, the deletion of many records at once. But be careful. There’s no undo or rollback on bulk delete jobs. If data here is deleted in error, you will need to rely on backup processes outside of the Common Data Service to restore this data. We discuss how to configure a bulk delete job, which is similar to building an advanced find query, and a few of the security requirements to take into consideration for bulk delete. For our hands-on, we deleted the data that we had already brought in.