Create and manage custom data sources

  • 4 minutes

Both BYOD and Entity store depend on the creation and management of custom entities and data sources to provide the correct data for your organization's reporting or analyzing needs. To learn more about configuring and creating data entities, go to Build and consume data entities.

When you have created a data entity with your custom data sources, you can then manage them in the Data management workspace in finance and operations apps.

Implement custom data sources

Creating and managing custom data sources are the first steps of BYOD setup. However, to implement the customized data sources and entities that you create, you first need to configure the Entity export option in the Data management workspace, publish the entity schema to your SQL database in Azure, and finally export the data into the BYOD.

To configure the Entity export option in the Data management workspace, follow these steps:

  1. Select the Data management workspace tile in finance and operations apps.
  2. If you've previously configured any databases, a list is shown; otherwise, you will configure a new database by selecting New in the Action Pane and entering a unique name and description.
  3. Enter a connection string. In the connection string, the logical server name should resemble the nnnn.database.windows.net format that is found in the Azure portal. The format is as follows:
    • Data Source=<logical server name>,1433; Initial Catalog=<your DB name>; Integrated Security=False; User ID=<SQL user ID>; Password=<password>
  4. When the connection string is entered, select Validate and ensure that the database that you configured for the entity export appears in the lists of databases.
  5. After the entity export has been configured, you will publish the entity schema to the database in Azure. Publishing enables you to publish new entities to the database, delete previously published entities from the database, compare published entities with the entity schema from finance and operations apps, and configure change tracking functionality that enables incremental updates of the data.
  6. After all entities are published to the destination database, you can use the export function in the Data management workspace to move data by defining the data movement job that contains one or more of the entities that you have chosen.

The export option can be used for CSV files in data migration but can also be used to move data to the BYOD.

Consider the following when exporting:

  • There is an option to do a bulk, batch job export, and smaller, incremental exports that occur more often.
  • Timeouts are associated with the BYOD exports that are set to ten minutes for truncation operations and one hour for actual bulk insert operations. If volumes are high, you might need to adjust the timeout settings for each company.

Make sure you know the following limitations of the tools in use:

  • BYOD can have no active locks on your database during Synchronization.
  • BYOD cannot export composite entities into your own database.
  • Entities that don't have unique keys cannot be exported by using the incremental push.

For more information on BYOD, go to Bring your own database (BYOD).