Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Hello Experts,

I am looking for some advice on integrating our custom reservation system built on Oracle DB with Dynamics 365 CE.

Current design:

We have local reservation system (ERP) that is built on an on-premise Oracle DB which has a one way integration to feed custom reservation data along with Agency and Contact data into Dynamics 365 CE. This is setup using some locally deployed apps that create csv files of data to be loaded into crm and plugs that read the csv files and dump the data into staging entities which are further processed to create the transactional data in D365 CRM.

This design has been unreliable with plugin failures and the volume of the transactional data has increased too over the years. With the new D365 licensing, we have to decrease our CDS usage drastically and buying additional storage addons as we did in the past was no longer viable.

Potential new design:

We are trying to explore new scalable options of potentially storing the transactional data from our reservation system in Azure Data Lake Gen 2 or in a Cosmos DB and surface this data into D365 CE as virtual entities. In addition we want to replicate our Contact and Account data into ADLS Gen 2 and setup some change triggers to enable two way integration of this data. To add further complexity to this, we would be moving away from our local reservation system which has about 30 years of transactional data to a global system which is also built on Oracle DB. Unfortunately the data model of both these reservation systems are slightly different. The thinking is to convert the data from the legacy reservation system and the new reservation system into a common model and store it in ADLS Gen 2 or in Cosmos DB so that this data can be used both by D365 and Power BI for any reporting needs.

Could you please share your thoughts on whether this is a solution design to peruse considering the large volume of operational data in addition to large volume of marketing data that would be generated by the marketing team without blowing up the D365 licensing fee?

Also could someone share some thoughts on storing data in Cosmos DB Vs storing data in ADLS Gen 2 to reference it back in D365 using virtual entities? My understanding of a Data Lake is a storage that enables data from different sources with different structures that can be transformed and consumed by applications. With Cosmos DB you are having to restrict how you store that data. I am new to these concepts so please feel free to correct me if i am wrong in my understanding.

Thanks in advance for your guidance.