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Microsoft Dataverse vs Azure Cosmos DB

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Posted on by rodneyc8063

Hi folks,

Hopefully this is a simple question with an easy answer that I totally missed from all the reading I have been doing recently 🙂

I have been slowly immersing myself in all the offerings from Microsoft, in particular on the data side. I see Microsoft has a number of services (many with overlap it seems) so its got my head spinning a bit.

I was just learning all about Azure Cosmos DB, and as far as I understand it Cosmos DB is described as a "multi model database system". It can handle a number of integrations with MongoDB, MariaDB etc etc. Cosmos DB is advertised as being used by many of Microsofts applications etc etc - Ok so this sorta makes sense

Then comes the Dataverse and my confusion.

Dataverse from what I gather seems to be built on Azure SQL Database? And is mainly for the "Power Platform" suite of applications? I read in some places that the Dataverse isnt part of "Azure" per say, and its more then just a DBMS as it also has a number of API's?

So I guess my question is - Whats the difference between the Dataverse and Azure CosmosDB?

In my very simple mind, it just sounds like both are database systems - Am I missing something?

Thanks in advance

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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Drew Poggemann 9,287 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @rodneyc8063 ,

I answered a question on Dataverse vs. SQL in the following response (https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Dataverse/Dataverse-Vs-SQL-Azure/m-p/1238904 )

and @EricRegnier wrote a great blog article here: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Community-Blog/Dataverse-is-not-a-database/ba-p/756215

Dataverse is utilized behind all model-based Power Apps and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications and can be used in Power Apps Canvas Apps and through APIs as you discussed.

I have not worked a lot with Azure Cosmos DB but I do know it is a powerful database engine in Azure that is schema-agnostic and supports, as you mentioned, MongoDB, Cassandra and other data formats. It is also geographically dispersed for excellent performance no matter where you are in the world with the data replicated locally and can handle very large volumes of data. I would normally think of using Cosmos DB in No-SQL type of situations vs. standard relational data that I would store in Dataverse.

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rodneyc8063 7 on at

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Many thanks for the detailed links! @dpoggemann

This clarifies a lot!

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