This article is continuation of my previous post, Glance At Microsoft Dataverse,
In my previous article, did I mention “The data is stored based on components like, tables rows and columns.”? Yes, I did…!
So, in this article let’s look at Tables and Columns in Microsoft Dataverse.
If you have basic knowledge about databases, Tables and columns are nothing new. And of course, our Excel is good example to visualize Tables and Columns.
Table is combination of rows and columns. Additionally, with features available within Microsoft Dataverse more functionalities can be defined such as business and logical behaviour around data that’s stored, that too out-of-box…!
Tables are categorized into 3 types listed below:
Standard: Tables that are included as part of Dataverse environment, also called as out-of-box tables. Majority of the standard tables can be customized. Example of some of the standard tables are Account, Contact, Task etc.
Managed: Tables that are imported into the environment as part of a managed solution.
Custom: Tables that are created new, directly in the Dataverse environment or unmanaged tables that are either imported from an unmanaged solution.
Did you hear some new terms…? Environment, Managed, Unmanaged solution, Import etc.? RELAX… we will explore about them as we start to understand Dataverse in depth
Now let’s look at Columns!
Columns are a way to store a discrete piece of information within a row in a table. This is the statement as per Microsoft documentation that explain columns. What does that mean?
Let’s say we want to store detail of a Student, Name and Age. To start with, we create a Custom Table “Student”, then create two Columns Name and Age and with data type Text and Number, respectively.
Did I say, “Data Type”? That’s what Column is all about. By defining columns, we define the type of data that we are going to store that suite the data defined for that column. There are various types of data types available for creating columns such as Text, Choices, Number the list is long.
Finally. This is how the table will look like after adding Name and Age of two students.
In the next article we will explore more features such as relationships, environments etc.
Thank You for Reading…!
asas
