Power Platform environments in your Microsoft 365 tenant can optionally have a CDS database. You can add a database when creating an environment, or you can add a database later.
We will look at the security aspects for managing environments in Chapter 8, Security.
Each environment can only have one CDS database.
The CDS is a cloud data store based on Azure SQL, Azure Data Lake, and Azure Blob storage. You interact with CDS via the Power Apps Maker portal (https://make.powerapps.com).
You cannot currently connect to the CDS using SQL Server Data Manager or other similar data tools. There is a Tabular Data Stream (TDS) endpoint in preview that will allow SQL queries to be used with the CDS.
The CDS provides data and services to apps, as shown in the following diagram:
Figure 3.2 – Services provided by the CDS
The rest of this book addresses many of these application services.
Before we start customizing the CDS, you need...