Love Hate Power Apps at the Moment- Storage Capacity in my Default Environment

[Mbombace]

As the title suggests, I have a love/hate relationship with Power Apps and CDS at the moment. Microsoft is crap. Now that we got that out of the way, I am struggling big time here with all of the "cants" that I am being told this platform cant do. For Example...

1) You cant back up a default environment- OK, so let me create/switch environments!

2) Cant create a new environment- you are 108% over your data usage limit of your non-backup-able environment. Sucks to be you!

3) How do I clean up my current environment to determine how in the heck I am using 2 G B of data storage- Nope, cant see which variables are eating up the data.

Sense a theme here? 

Oh, on last one for good measure. 

4) Can I call Microsoft Tech Support for Power Apps/CDS to see if they can tell me how in the heck I am using 2 GB of data.... NOPE, I mean, cant.... Email only, and 24 hour response if you are lucky. Its like everyone else is trying to get Sh*t done, except "the soft".

Oh crap, now im banned for life. Oh well, at least I will have my sanity...

[v-bofeng-msft]

Hi @Mbombace :

   I'm sorry to hear that you have a bad experience.Because of its characteristics, all users cannot back up it, so if you we want to back up one environment, we can only back up other environments.

  According to your description, you seem to be facing the problem of excess storage capacity. Unfortunately, when the tenant exceeds the storage capacity rights, the following management operations will be unavailable:

• Create environment
• Copy environment
• Restore the environment

To solve this problem, I suggest you can buy some additional capacity or release some capacity.

  Maybe you already know these points, but it seems that there is no better choice.If you want to improve this part of the experience, I suggest make suggestions in the Power Apps Ideas forum.

Best Regards,

Bof

[Scott_Slice]

I find the environment to be really buggy, inconsistent and generally not very intuitive.   It's a shame b/c the product is really necessary.  Microsoft Access is buggy at times but it's way more predictable then PowerApps.  I can write code in VBA and it either works or does not work.  I have so many formulas in PowerApps that at some points work and others just fail randomly.  It needs a lot of work.  I am not confident at all in putting out production apps for fear of delegation issues, differing behavior between published apps and what you see in Play/Development mode, inconsistent event handling on combo boxes vs. other form objects, inability to traverse multiple levels of relationships in CDS when going up a 1:Many hierarchy (a clearly deterministic query), do I use DataCardValue.Text, ThisItem, the physical layer name, etc. etc.. These things are way more difficult than they need to be.

[Alexandreio]

I totally agree with Scott. I was convinced by the "low-code" promise, to give it a try for a pilot app - a simple solution with tasks and timesheets. Now, I find myself trapped in a buggy and inconsistent environment, riddled with stubborn errors and foolish default behaviors. Whenever I try a deviation from the simplistic "as is", the road is full of mysterious limitations and fails (all the time making you wonder "but why they keep taking the counter-intuitive way???"). At the end, I may find a way out, but it takes lots of time, lots of searching, lots of community tricks and tons of workarounds. So the outcome is usually ugly, difficult to read and maintain (almost impossible for another person to understand what I have done and why). On top of that, it will be also insecure regarding performance and how to build future upgrades - not to mention that I'm 100% locked in MS box, whatever it means for roadmap, licensing, etc. Serious thought is required before taking "low-code" into account;  it's usually faster to do the job the proper way.

[nakizo]

I agree.  I am evaluating it 2 years later and I find it a confusing mess.  I built my first low-code app 32 years ago in Borland's Objectvision.  I am absolutely at a loss as to how this is the best Microsoft can do.  Crushing innovation at every turn.