LookUps in Dataverse for Teams vs LookUps in Sharepointlists

[drwaz]

Hi all, posting a more general question here regarding relationships/lookups

I've been building apps in PowerApps using Sharepoint lists as a datasource. In the beginning I used lookUps in those sharepointlists to sort of help defining the relationships between tables (even tho it's not a relational database).

Of course I ran into trouble with those, especially with load times but also general patch issues and so on.

Took some advice from here and replaced all my lookup columns with just basic ID columns where I added the ID from Parent table and used that with lookups whitin powerapps to create collections. The result, was in many cases dramtically faster worker apps.

Im looking into Dataverse for teams now and I see that relationships between tables are defined using lookups.

Because of my horrible experience using LookUps whitin sharepoint im hestitant to use these.

So my question is, do the lookup relationships whitin Dataverse impact performance in PowerApps in a negative way like they do with sharepoint lists? Or are they just fine cause Dataverse is made to be able to handle these? Or should I just stick with my way of adding matching ID columns and not have any relationship at all?

New to dataverse and not by far an expert on relational databases

[EricRegnier · Accepted solution]

Hi @drwaz,

Dataverse behind the scenes uses a relational database Azure SQL and Dataverse lookups are defined as a 1-N relationship with a primary key foreign key of type GUID. It's exactly made to do this and no it doesn't impact performance. In have many cases with >1M records in a table with >30 lookups :). This is one of the reasons why Dataverse scales a lot more than SharePoint.

More info on lookups: https://docs.microsoft.com/powerapps/maker/data-platform/data-platform-entity-lookup 
Hope this helps!

[drwaz]

Hi, yes

Thanks for the answer!

I've build two similar apps next to eachother, one running on sharepoint lists as datasource and one dataverse with lookups.

Altho not any major operations so far I can tell there is no performance impact with using the dataverse lookups that I was scared of.