How to Access Live Microsoft Dataverse Data in Power Automate Desktop via ODBC

Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism

The CData ODBC Driver for Microsoft Dataverse enables you to integrate Microsoft Dataverse data into workflows built using Microsoft Power Automate Desktop.

The CData ODBC Driver for Microsoft Dataverse enables you to access live Microsoft Dataverse data in workflow automation tools like Power Automate. This article shows how to integrate Microsoft Dataverse data into a simple workflow, moving Microsoft Dataverse data into a CSV file.

Through optimized data processing, CData ODBC Drivers offer unmatched performance for interacting with live Microsoft Dataverse data in Microsoft Power Automate. When you issue complex SQL queries from Power Automate to Microsoft Dataverse, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to Microsoft Dataverse and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations client-side (e.g. SQL functions and JOIN operations).

About Microsoft Dataverse Data Integration

CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Microsoft Dataverse (formerly the Common Data Service). Customers use CData connectivity to:

Access both Dataverse Entities and Dataverse system tables to work with exactly the data they need.
Authenticate securely with Microsoft Dataverse in a variety of ways, including Azure Active Directory, Azure Managed Service Identity credentials, and Azure Service Principal using either a client secret or a certificate.
Use SQL stored procedures to manage Microsoft Dataverse entities - listing, creating, and removing associations between entities.

CData customers use our Dataverse connectivity solutions for a variety of reasons, whether they're looking to replicate their data into a data warehouse (alongside other data sources)or analyze live Dataverse data from their preferred data tools inside the Microsoft ecosystem (Power BI, Excel, etc.) or with external tools (Tableau, Looker, etc.).

Getting Started

Connect to Microsoft Dataverse as an ODBC Data Source

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

You can connect without setting any connection properties for your user credentials. Below are the minimum connection properties required to connect.

InitiateOAuth: Set this to GETANDREFRESH. You can use InitiateOAuth to avoid repeating the OAuth exchange and manually setting the OAuthAccessToken.
OrganizationUrl: Set this to the organization URL you are connecting to, such as https://myorganization.crm.dynamics.com.
Tenant (optional): Set this if you wish to authenticate to a different tenant than your default. This is required to work with an organization not on your default Tenant.

When you connect the Common Data Service OAuth endpoint opens in your default browser. Log in and grant permissions. The OAuth process completes automatically.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing workflows.

Integrate Microsoft Dataverse Data into Power Automate Workflows

After configuring the DSN for Microsoft Dataverse, you are ready to integrate Microsoft Dataverse data into your Power Automate workflows. Open Microsoft Power Automate, add a new flow, and name the flow.

👁 A new flow in Power Automate

In the flow editor, you can add the actions to connect to Microsoft Dataverse, query Microsoft Dataverse using SQL, and write the query results to a CSV document.

Add an Open SQL Connection Action

Add an "Open SQL connection" action (Actions -> Database) and configure the properties.

Connection string: DSN=CData Microsoft Dataverse Source

After configuring the action, click Save.

👁 A configured 'Open SQL connection' action

Add an Execute SQL Statement Action

Add an "Execute SQL statement" action (Actions -> Database) and configure the properties.

Get connection by: SQL connection variable
SQL connection: %SQLConnection% (the variable from the "Open SQL connection" action above)
SQL statement: SELECT * FROM Accounts

After configuring the action, click Save.

👁 A configured 'Execute SQL statement' action

Add a Write to CSV File Action

Add a "Write to CSV file" action (Actions -> File) and configure the properties.

Variable to write to: %QueryResult% (the variable from the "Execute SQL statement" action above)
File path: set to a file on disk
Configure Advanced settings as needed.

After configuring the action, click Save.

👁 A configured 'Write to CSV file' action

Add a Close SQL Connection Action

Add a "Close SQL connection" action (Actions -> Database) and configure the properties.

SQL Connection: %SQLConnection% (the variable from the "Open SQL connection" action above)

After configuring the action, click Save.

👁 A configured 'Close SQL connection' action

Save & Run the Flow

Once you have configured all the actions for the flow, click the disk icon to save the flow. Click the play icon to run the flow.

👁 A fully configured workflow

Now you have a workflow to move Microsoft Dataverse data into a CSV file.

👁 Application data in a CSV file (Salesforce is shown)

With the CData ODBC Driver for Microsoft Dataverse, you get live connectivity to Microsoft Dataverse data within your Microsoft Power Automate workflows.

URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/dataverse-odbc-power-automate.rst