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What would be the reasons to use Dataverse for my PowerApp over SharePoint?

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Posted on by futr_vision 831 Moderator

I have an app where I've been using Dataverse tables for my app. The problem I run into is Dataverse is a Premium connector. That means I need to get a Per App license for 10+ people. I am wondering what Dataverse gains me vs moving my data/tables over to SharePoint? 

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Building Power Apps
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    Ami K Profile Picture
    Ami K 15,687 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

    @futr_vision - 

    This a broad topic for a forum post, but some key points based on my experience (our organisation uses both):

     

    • Relationships: While similar in that both are tabular data sources, Dataverse is relational whereas SharePoint is unstructured. Dataverse is a true relational database with support for many-to-many relationships across multiple tables. Although SharePoint has a Lookup data type which allows users to “relate” a field to another list with a One-to-Many/Many-to-One cardinality, there is no way to support Many-to-Many relationships without significant performance issues.

      A data source like Dataverse natively supports Many-to-Many relationships with an "intersect" table which is automatically provisioned in the background to manage those relationships.

      Even if you used a Single Line Text or Number column instead of a LookUp column to “relate” multiple lists together (using a common identifier), for a simple delegable operation like a Filter, Power Apps will send a query to SharePoint to get all the items that match that query for each table. This will throttle your data source because it is firing a query at multiple tables, and you will end up with a 429 error. You will not experience this with Dataverse.

    • Delegation: More functions are delegable with Dataverse. In addition to the Search, In, and First functions being delegable, the "Does not Equal" ( "<>" ) operator is also delegable across multiple data types, as well as aggregate formulas such as SUM, MAX, and MIN.

    • Model Driven Apps: only supported with Dataverse

    • Performance: Dataverse is faster (going beyond 5,000 rows in SharePoint results in performance degradation)

    • Other: The Common Data Model, Virtual Tables, significantly more security features including Column Level Security, Business Process Flows, Business Rules, Polymorphic LookUps, Global Choices, and special data types like the Customer and Currency columns.

    However, I also think SharePoint is significantly easier to use for simpler apps and data structures, and it is more straightforward to make bulk updates to the data source. SharePoint is also designed from the ground-up to manage document libraries and the associated metadata. Version control is also easier to easier to query in Power BI.

     

    To conclude, when we need evaluate whether we need to leverage Dataverse or SharePoint for a solution, so long as the features below are not must-have requirements, I am able to comfortably create the solution using SharePoint.

     

    • Many-to-Many relationships
    • Model Driven App
    • Enhanced Security (e.g. properly limit which users can access the App with custom security roles)
  • futr_vision Profile Picture
    futr_vision 831 Moderator on at

    Thanks. I typically prefer to go the route of having too many features or too much power/flexibility rather than have to find out I need something later on. It really boils down to licensing  costs in this case. Of course, there is always porting this app over to PowerApps for Teams. Using the Dataverse there didn't trigger licensing issues but if I understand correctly, there are still limitations vs using the web version. What I did find interesting is when I tested exporting the solution and importing the solution and Dataverse tables into Teams, was that anyone trying to log into the web version was presented with the option of opening in the browser or in Teams. Seems like they get stitched together. I'm not positive yet but it looked like everything ported over correctly....mostly. I did have one situation where I used references for UI (font size, border size, x/y positioning, etc.) that broke but I think that might have had to do with how that info was stored and retrieved

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