Tabular Data Stream (TDS) Protocol endpoint for Common Data Service (CDS)

Common Data Service (CDS) is a native data store for Power Platform applications. Historically,  the CDS OData endpoint served as the single access point for all types of operations. We are introducing a preview of an additional way to access read-only data in CDS.  The  TDS  endpoint for CDS allows read-only access to the system for reporting and analytics.  The TDS endpoint is managed by an administrator.

For this preview of TDS, we are limiting this endpoint to read-only actions. As TDS implies, we are providing access to CDS data in a tabular format.  With the addition of TDS we have the benefit of allowing additional applications access to CDS data. However, current support is limited to SSMS (v18.4 and higher) and Power BI applications.

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is an integrated environment for managing any SQL infrastructure, from SQL Server to Azure SQL Database. We are not building a fully integrated SSMS management experience for CDS. SSMS is used to allow T-SQL access to CDS through it. Therefore only database, tables and columns access are available through Object Explorer. In query one can use all read-only T-SQL queries that run on the server.  For example temporary memory of client is not available for TDE.  See more here.

Power BI desktop used to create reports on data sets. Starting now Direct Query connection is available to TDS for CDS. This results in immediate data access and  provides native security of CDS in Power BI. See more info here.

Note that this new capability is in a Preview state.  There may be breaking changes in the future.

We are excited to have our customers and partners try out this new capability.

Thanks,

The CDS Platform Team

(Editors Note: A video of this can be found here: https://youtu.be/pRh16EEi6qw )