Archive data in Dynamics 365 finance and operations apps with Dataverse Long Term Retention (Preview)
Dyn365FO applications enable customized retention policies to securely and cost-effectively archive and retain unlimited data for the long term, have no data limits and support your business growth. But you may need to move historical and inactive data for some reason, whether by policy or otherwise, to Dataverse long-term retention.
This feature does not limit the number of records that can be used, the initial data replication sync to Dataverse data is limited to 100 million records in the largest table, it is recommended to trim any table with more than 100 million records before testing this feature.
In this blog I will explain some important concepts associated with this functionality and step by step how to install it. It should be noted that the version is in Preview so it is subject to change.
What is Long Term Retention?
Long term retention is a data archival capability that helps increase available storage space and improve overall system performance. This functionality moves your data to a Microsoft managed data lake and automatically saves a copy of this data to history.
By saving a copy to history, your data will be stored in historical tables within your SQL database. Historical tables occupy lesser space by using fewer indexes. This allows you to easily view your data in history and restore the data if needed.
What are the three phases of the enterprise application lifecycle?
- Active data
- Transitions to inactive historical data that is required for compliance and regulatory reasons.
- Transitions to deleted data
Finance and operations data types that can be archived with Dataverse long term retention
These are the types of financial and operational data that can be used for Dataverse long-term retention:
- Dynamics 365 Finance General ledger
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management inventory transactions
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management sales orders
- Support for additional data types is planned in future releases.
Application administrators can schedule archiving jobs and specify criteria for supported functional scenarios. Table data for functional scenarios is archived to Dataverse long-term retention. The archiving job is initiated from the Dyn365FO archiving workspace.
Prepare the environment to archive data in finance
- Refresh your data in your sandbox instance to align it with your instance.
- Ensure that your sandbox instance is on the latest version of Finance version 10.0.39.
- If the Microsoft Power Platform environment is not configured for the sandbox instance, check the following documentation Enable Power Platform Integration — Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
Enable the Sql row version change tracking license key
Active sql row version change tracking license configuration is active.
Check licence Tracking of Sql row version changes
If it is not active, the environment must be left in maintenance mode and the change must be made.
When we want to modify the licence we will be asked the following question:
Set up Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations to archive data with Dataverse long-term retention
In Power Platform admin center, go to Environments, Select the environment and check if the environment is managed, if it is not managed, go to environment and click in Enable Managed Environments option.
When you click on the option, you have different alternatives to manage the environment, choose the ones that best suit your needs and click on Enable.
For more information about Managed environment :
Update Finance and Operations Virtual Entities if the status is update.
Once updated verify that the environment has Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Platform Tools Details installed.
Install Dynamics 365 Archive with Dataverse Long Term Retention
Enable Synapse link profile creation in the Power Apps portal
You must perform the following configuration in a note:
https://make.preview.powerapps.com/environments/@@DATAVERSER_ENV_ID@@/exporttodatalake?athena.mdl=true. Replace @@DATAVERSER_ENV_ID@@ with the globally unique identifier (GUID) of the environment. You can find this in Power Platform admin center or Lifecicle Services
Open the URL in a new browser window.
Select Microsoft OneLake and Manage tables. Search for Bientity, select the entities that appear in the list, and then select Save.
You should consult the list of tables that allow file customizations and select only what you want to use, do not select all tables as data from all tables will be synchronized applying dataverse’s long term retention feature.
Enable Finance and Operation data archival with Dataverse long term retention
In Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, go to Feature management and select the Archive with Dataverse long term retention feature for overall archival service integration.
The Archive with Dataverse long term retention workspace should be available in the Workspaces list in Finance and Operations.
For the example we will create a new long term retention job — Sales Orders
Where can we visualize the storage consumed by the data archived in Dataverse long-term retention?
In the Dataverse capacity report, the archived finance and operations tables will be displayed with the suffix “-Retained” and provide a logical view of the storage capacity consumed by the archived finance and operations data in Dataverse long-term retention.
To view this report go to Power platform admin center, go to capacity, environment and go to details.
As you can see, the functionality is installed and the process is running, archiving the information in Dataverse and can be viewed in the Power platform admin center.
For more information..
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