Chapter 13: Introducing Industry Data Models

A challenge that you already might have come across when modeling your analytical environment is to create not only the model but also all its details. When you need to integrate data from different source systems, you don't want to forget the necessary details when you create your target model.

There is nothing worse than identifying missing attributes or wrong data types in a target object when you are already two-thirds of the way through your implementation. Adjusting data mappings and cleansing routines and formulas at a late stage in your development process can be a cumbersome situation that slows down your development and extends your delivery time. Industry data models that reflect years of experience and best practices can help you accelerate your development.

This chapter will give you an overview of the industry data models that you can leverage using Microsoft's Common Data Model (CDM). You will discover the...

Understanding Common Data Model

In its initial version, CDM provided predefined entities and their data types in a standardized notation. In the second generation, Microsoft extended it to be able to reflect complex semantic contexts such as relationships.

CDM is not just targeted at analytical use cases. You can use its predefined entities, language elements, rules, and structures in any application.

If you examine services such as Azure Data Factory/Synapse pipelines, for example, or the Modern Workplace power suite with apps such as Power Apps, Flow, and Power BI, you will find connectors that will be able to use the models that you define with CDM.

CDM is reflected in a collection of JSON documents (*.cdm.json) that follow a certain schema that can be seen as the language of CDM. Let's dive into its elements.

Examining the basics of the SDK

The top-level container that collects all artifacts of a CDM construct is called the corpus. It provides path definitions...

Examining and leveraging predefined entities

Wait, didn't we talk about predefined entities at the beginning of the chapter? Up to now, it was about the understanding of the structures and the objects. But the major benefit of using CDM is the collection of predefined entities that you can use and extend to support your application and your analytical estate.

The collection of entities is grouped into so-called sub-folders:

• applicationCommon
• industryCommon
• operationsCommon

There you will find a multitude of predefined entities with their structures ready for you to use in your system.

Let's double-click on applicationCommon, for example. You will find the following entities there:

Figure 13.1 – Entities of applicationCommon

You will find another sub-folder too: foundationCommon. This holds 3 more sub-folders with 22 entities related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), 5 entities related to financial topics...

Discovering Azure Industry Data Workbench

Recently, Microsoft has launched a beta version of the so-called Industry Data Workbench. This is a new application that will give you a graphical interface to industry data models for 10 different industries:

Figure 13.2 – Available industry models of Industry Data Workbench

When you click on one of the tiles, you are taken to a development canvas. You can choose to browse the whole collection graphically by browsing to the Select entities by enterprise model drop-down box in the upper-left corner and checking the whole group:

Figure 13.3 – The whole group for Consumer Goods selected

The canvas will display all the tables and their relationships and you can zoom in and out as you wish:

Figure 13.4 – Graphical representation of the Consumer Goods model

In the lower-right corner, you will find a small navigation map that will help you in moving...

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned about Microsoft CDM. You have seen the language elements of its SDK and you had a glance at the depth of the available predefined entities that you can use from CDM for your applications.

In the second part of the chapter, you had a sneak peek into the available beta version of Industry Data Workbench and you were able to build a first idea of how this tool will make your life easier when you're developing applications and analytical systems in the future.

In the final chapter, Chapter 14, Establishing Data Governance, you will see how you can use Azure Purview to identify and classify sensible data to secure and organize insights and catalog your data estate to actively govern it.

Further reading

• CDM:
• CDM object types and definitions:
• Entity relationships: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/sdk/manifest#entity-relationships
• Available entities in CDM: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/schema/core/overview
• The CDM APIs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/1.0om/api-reference/api-reference
• Dataverse: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/data-platform/