CDS Entity Sizing/Data Usage

[Anonymous]

Hi, 

I'm a newbie to the Power Apps platform and have question regarding how much space CDS entities consume out of my capacity entitlement. Is there way to estimate, based on the columns defined in my custom entity how much each row will take up?

I've done this in the past with traditional RDBMS like SQL Server, Oracle but wondered if you can do the same with CDS entities.

[EricRegnier]

Hi @Anonymous,

Not that I know of but out-of-the-box vanilla CDS takes around 1GB of space and it comes with about 66 entities besides the other core functionality and business logic (processes, plugins, etc). You can probably estimate based on that?

Cheers

[v-xida-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Do you want to estimate how much space would be consumed when you define some columns in your custom Entity?

Regarding the needs that you mentioned, I think the "Environment capacity analytics" functionality in Power Platform Admin Center could achieve your needs.

You could consider sign in your Power Platform Admin Center, then go to "Resources"-> "Capacity"option. Then switch to "Storage capacity" tab, find your Environment, then click "Detail" option, then you would see the consumption your Entity take up:

Please try above solution, then check if the issue is solved.

More details about "Environment capacity analytics" functionality in Power Platform Admin Center, please check the following article:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/capacity-storage#environment-capacity-analytics

Regards,

[EricRegnier]

To clarify on the previous post, the capacity analytics in the Admin Center analyzes the current storage and does not estimate what it would consume or future consumption. 
If you need the current then that is the place to go. Cheers

[DavidJennaway · Accepted solution]

Beyond the base estimate of 1GB as per the previous post, the storage for entities can be estimated as similar to that for SQL Server for any entities and fields that you add, with the addition of ~150 bytes per record for system fields (createdby, modifiedon) etc. If you want to do the calculations in detail, assume that decimal types have scale = 38, and date time is stored as the SQL datetime datatype. Also currency fields and rollup fields have additional system fields auto-created (though they show up in the UI).

In overall use, the things that can have a big affect on storage are:

• Audit logs; necessarily dependent on how much you audit, and how many changes are made
• If using CDS/Dynamics workflows, the storage of the state of these can take up a fair bit of space. You can specify if completed jobs are automatically deleted over time, but this won't cover long-running jobs (e.g. with wait conditions), or those that fail
• Files, and especially email attachments if emails are tracked
• Activities; if a lot are created then this can add up. For each activity there are significantly more system fields than other entity types; I'd reckon on 1KB overhead per activity record

[Anonymous]

Hi Eric,
Thanks for your comment. So does the out-of-the-box CDS comsume 1GB without any data. My solution is planning on using mostly custom entities so I am assuming these custom entities would use additional space?

[EricRegnier]

Yep without any data. What consumes the first GB are the out of the box entities, all the system tables/entities to support the core functionality and the system assemblies and processes (workflows, jobs, BPFs, etc).

Yes your custom entities and their records would consume additional space.

Storage is segregated in 3:

1) data (your custom entities would fall in this)

2) logs 

3) files

More info on this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/capacity-storage#capacity-page-details