The Entity Store and embedded Power BI

We will start this chapter by talking about the Entity Store and seeing why it’s useful but also limited if we want to create new reports.

The Entity Store is a built-in data store in Dynamics 365 F&O. If you’ve ever opened SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) in a development VM, you’ll have probably seen a database called AxDW; this is where Entity Store data resides.

And what is using this data? If you’re familiar with F&O workspaces, you have probably seen some dashboards being displayed there. These dashboards are Power BI reports that are displayed inside F&O and that consume the data in the Entity Store (see Figure 8.1):

Figure 8.1 – Vendor payments workspace

For example, in the Vendor payments workspace, we see the Analytics tab. This tab contains a Power BI report that’s loading data from the Entity Store. These are known as analytical workspaces...