Migrating Dataverse data across Power Platform environments

[@matthewdevaney3912]

PAC tool CMT is now a command? Wow, who knew. Good tip!

[@Diskdrive-WLiu]

Absolutely. No more needing to grab it from NuGet

[@rudivanderlocht3212]

Nice video !! Question :What to do if you have a lookup filed to another table?

[@Diskdrive-WLiu]

Thanks for the question! Do you mean like if the table you are migrating has a reference to another table? In which case, I would make sure that that reference table data is already migrated first, otherwise it'll fail. Overall though, I would mainly use this tool to migrate reference tables as opposed to live data. So data that is supposed to be the same across different environments and users don't change it.

[@abutr3]

Awesome tip ! But how about using dataflow for this? Is there a reason to use cmt instead of dataflow?

[@Diskdrive-WLiu]

wow fantastic question! As usual, there's more than one tool for the job but as to which you should use, the answer really depends on your use case. But let's unpack it. I think dataflow is much useful for ingesting data. It supports multiple data sources, it has transforming and joining capability. It has some pretty advanced features intended for scenarios where you're regularly pulling external data into the dataverse. CMT on the other hand is much more about reference data. Data that users don't edit and in many ways are integral to your app operating correctly (think lookup tables etc). The advantage with cmt over dataflows is that the data is exported into a consumable format. I haven't mentioned it in this video because it's a whole topic altogether (perhaps I'll create another video on it) but best practice is to put this data into a source repo along with the rest of your solution. And then once you've done that, you now have the ability to use CI/CD pipelines to automatically push it to other environments in a safe and consistent manner. Hope that helps - and if you have some other thoughts, interested to hear them as well!

[@abutr3]

@@Diskdrive-WLiu got it! Microsoft as usual! You can create a user via power shell or via control panel depends on your taste 🤣

[@abutr3]

@@Diskdrive-WLiu so essentialy it is better for product setup. Params and everything else. Got it! Thx for the overview

[@Christian-w9h]

Isn´t there a cloud tool yet? Using a desktop tool to transfer tables from Env-A to Env-B where both are stored in the cloudm should not involve using manual tool on a PC!

[@Diskdrive-WLiu]

Good question! Yes if you do want to automate this, this can be done via a DevOps pipeline (although you still will need this tool initially to actually grab the schema). Maybe I'll do a video on this at some stage.

[@singamsgr]

​@@Diskdrive-WLiu Thank you for the video, we're still waiting for devops video.

[@notme7661]

thanks