What is Common Data Model

When creating business solutions, you often need to integrate data across your organizations different business applications. This cross-app integration can be challenging at times. While the data is similar, it isn’t necessarily stored the same across different applications. To help simplify this, multiple technology leaders created the Common Data Model initiative. The goal is to have a common structure that is easily applied across different applications. Organizations can create and share their own data types and tags by using Microsoft’s Common Data Model, which has an extensive metadata system. This helps capture valuable business insight, which can be integrated and enriched with data to deliver actionable intelligence.

With the Common Data Model, you can structure your data to represent concepts and activities that are commonly used and well understood. You can query and analyze that data, reuse it, and interoperate with other businesses and apps that use the same format. Organizations can create and share their own data types and tags by using Microsoft’s Common Data Model, which has an extensive metadata system.

Instead of building a new data model for your app, you can simply the table definitions available to you. Common Data Model is used by various applications and services including Microsoft Dataverse, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Azure. This commonality of data model ensures that all your services can access the same data. A fitting example of how to utilize the Common Data Model is the data-preparation capabilities in Power BI dataflows. Those dataflows create data files, which follow the Common Data Model definition. Those data files are stored in Azure Data Lake. The Common Data Model definitions are open and available to any service or application that wants to use them.

Data described using the Common Data Model can be used with Azure services to build scalable analytical solution. It can also be a source of semantically rich data for applications driving actionable insights, such as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Common Data Model is used to define entities for Dynamics 365 applications in Sales, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce can be readily available in Azure Data Lake.

Microsoft continues to extend the Common Data Model in collaboration with many partners and subject-matter experts. By building industry accelerators, Microsoft allows the following industries to benefit from the Common Data Model and the platforms that support it:

• Automotive
• Banking
• Healthcare
• Higher education
• Non-profit