Step By Step Instructions for Implementing a Microsoft Fabric Data Lakehouse with Cloud based Business Central as the main data source.

Management Summary

This series of blogs and videos demonstrate how to build a Microsoft Fabric Data Lakehouse (Fabric) using Cloud Business Central (BC) as the main data source using best practices.

Pre-requisites

You have a Business Central account including the sample CRONUS database. Sign up for a free trial – Business Central
You have an Azure account. Azure Free Account Or Pay As You Go
You have a Microsoft Fabric account Getting Started
You know the fundamentals of Business Central… Dynamics 365 Business Central training
You know the fundamentals of Azure … Course AZ-900T00-A: Introduction to Microsoft Azure
You know the fundamentals of Microsoft Fabric … Get started with Microsoft Fabric
You have created all the above services within the same Azure tenant / email account domain.

Architecture

Diagram

Narrative

Please read the diagram from left to right and top down.
Left to right indicates the flow of data where the main data source is cloud based Business Central. While Fabric Pipelines can technically connect to Business Central, they currently do not support OAuth 2.0 in the Copy Activity, which is required for secure access to Business Central. Therefore there is a need to use Azure Data Factory (ADF) to connect to Business Central and Load Data into the Bronze area of the Data Lakehouse.
Bronze contains an un-transformed version of all the available data held within Business Central. The data identified as needed for reporting is transformed and enriched from a Bronze schema into Silver schema. This Silver data is later transformed into Gold data consisting of Facts and Dimensions to from Star Schemas.
Fabric Pipelines, Fabric Gen 2 Data Flows and Notebooks will be considered for the data transformations.
The only business logic remaining which needs to be defined in the Semantic Layer is over-riding the filter context, e.g. comparison of sales on a user selected year with sales on the previous year to the selected year.
Finally Power BI us used to present to reporting data.

Reading top / down all the components are held within the same Azure backbone since all these services are Azure based. This increases security and reduces vulnerability with less administrative effort.
All the services are held within the same Azure tenant, in this case the domain dataplatformservices.com. This further increases security and reduces vulnerability with less administrative effort.
To ensure that Microsoft Defender for Cloud reports a security posture score of at least 80% it may be that the Azure components need to be protected using a Virtual Network.
Azure Dev Ops will be used for version control, deployment and project management.
Microsoft Entra will be used to create the service accounts (service principals) to connect the different services together.
Key Vault will be used to securely store the secrets for the service principals and other confidential information.