To fully leverage the continuous investment of Microsoft Azure data technologies and to enable a modern data warehouse architecture, Microsoft plans to replace the BYOD and Entity store in Azure Data Lake with a feature called data feeds. The data feeds feature allows administrators to configure Finance and Operations tables so that they can be published in an Azure Data Lake in the CDM folder format.

As shown in the following diagram, the data feeds service keeps the Finance and Operations table data in sync in the Azure Data Lake. Further data entities and aggregate measurements can be modeled within the Azure Data Lake. This model will eliminate the need for exporting the BYOD database and the Entity store and will provide greater flexibility for customers to define complete enterprise data warehouses and big data analytics using Azure Data Factory, Azure ML, and Azure Synapse Analytics:

The Dynamics 365 Customer engagement application is also publishing their entities data into Azure Data Lake, which enables not only customers but Microsoft and ISV partners to build advanced analytics solutions on top of Azure Data Lake to unlock complete insights from sales, product supply chains, and finance in one place.

The data feeds service provides data in Azure Data Lake and has the ability to query the data using SQL On-Demand. This not only enables reporting and analytics, but also enables additional scenarios such as third-party integration directly using data from Azure Data Lake.

To conclude this chapter, let's look at some best practices related to analytics and information insights.