Demystifying the Microsoft Dataverse Storage Model

As businesses progress on digital transformation journeys and combine data from various sources across their organisation, data volumes are growing exponentially. This includes organisations using Microsoft’s Dataverse Storage. 

To meet the demands of modern business apps, data storage solutions must adapt and cater to emerging scenarios, handle diverse data types, and assist organisations in navigating the escalating intricacies of compliance requirements.

Introducing Dataverse cloud storage

Dataverse is a data management platform built on Microsoft Azure. It stores data used by applications across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform.

If you are a Microsoft customer managing data across the Cloud Platform, it’s important to understand there is a maximum capacity for storage.

Microsoft Dataverse segments data across three data types, which have capacity limits, as explained below:

• Database: Storing and managing table definitions and data.
• File: Stores attachments to notes or emails in Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Field Service applications and Power Apps. These include documents, image files, videos, PDFs and other files.
• Log: Records table and column data changes over time for analysis and reporting purposes. Log capacity is designed to help organisations meet auditing, compliance, and governance policies.

If you are a user with admin access, you’ll likely want to regularly monitor the status of your storage usage and check available capacity. To do this, perform the following:

• Sign in to the Power Platform admin center, and then select an environment.
• Select Resources > Capacity > Summary tab.
• View the data on the Summary page.

The storage capacity dashboard will be similar to the example below.

Dataverse default and accrued subscription capacities

Dynamics 365 Data Storage Capacities

The above table shows that the first user receives 10GB of database capacity. Each D365 Enterprise level licence added accrues a further 250MB of database capacity. Therefore 4 extra users would mean a total of 11GB (10 GB + 250MB x 4).

PowerApps Data Storage

Power Automate Data Storage

Note, customers may have as many flows as needed with the per flow plan. Each flow will increase capacity limits.

Power Pages Data Storage

Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages and Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Field Service applications leverage the same tenant and infrastructure.

Dataverse capacity (Dataverse Database, Dataverse File, and Dataverse Log formats) is pooled across the tenant and shared amongst relevant application workloads.

There are additional Microsoft subscriptions beyond Power Platform that grant Dataverse capacity entitlements. Please refer to this Microsoft resource for details related to Project for the web, as well as the Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide for information related to other entitlements.

Power Platform capacity add-ons

Apps, flows or websites utilising Dataverse will consume varying quantities of Database capacity, File capacity, and Log capacity.

If additional subscription capacity is required, these optional add-on licenses can be added to your subscriptions.

Subscription add-ons apply across the tenant and are not tied to a specific user. Subscription add-ons can be purchased at any time and remain a part of the subscription for the remainder of the subscription term.

Add-on pricing will vary by region and plan, so we advise you to check with ServerSys, your Power Platform administrator or partner to provide a quote.

Indicative monthly prices for additional storage capacity are:

• Additional Database Capacity @ £30.20 per GB
• Additional File Capacity @ £1.50 per GB
• Additional Log Capacity @ £7.50 per GB

What should you do if you are over capacity?

If you find your tenant consuming too much data beyond capacity, you will be prevented from performing certain actions such as copying an environment.

When you navigate to the capacity page on the Power Platform Admin Center, it will provide analytics on which processes are using the most resources, and there are prompts on how to decrease space.

We would recommend speaking to ServerSys or your current partner about strategies to keep you under the limit.

Typically, the first step is to look at ways to reduce storage, this could be configuring audit logs or deleting hosted email attachments. You may also be able to use Dataverse Retention Policies or Azure Blob Storage to reduce storage costs.

If you are in a position where deleting data due is not possible for compliance or for other retention reasons, we recommend evaluating which Dataverse capacity add-ons are most cost-effective.

With regular notifications sent to administrators when capacity is close to the limit, this shouldn’t be a big surprise and will enable you to take steps before impacting your business.

What happens if you exceed Dataverse storage capacity?

Notifications will be generated when the storage capacities (database, file, or log) reach a critical level, with triggers set at less than 15% of available space.

Additionally, a warning notification will be sent when any of the storage capacities have less than 5% of space remaining, indicating a potential impact on administrative operations.

The final tier of notification will be activated when the tenant exceeds their storage entitlements, placing them in an “overage” situation.

This notification will alert the administrator that the following operations will be unavailable until the overage issue is resolved.

• Create a new environment (requires minimum 1GB capacity available)
• Copy an environment
• Restore an environment
• Convert a trial environment to paid (requires minimum 1GB capacity available)
• Recover an environment (requires minimum 1GB capacity available)
• Add a Dataverse database to an environment

An illustrative example of overcapacity

This tenant is 10 GB over in database usage. Despite having 200 GB of excess file storage, the tenant is considered to be in deficit. This tenant should free up storage or purchase more capacity.

However, if a tenant has extra space in the Database, this goes towards the maximum capacity for Log data types, but as only 5GB is remaining, this tenant would still be in deficit.

Dataverse Storage Capacity Questions?

Contact ServerSys for help optimising your cloud storage to ensure you make best use of the available capacities and avoid paying more than you need.

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