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Export data to an Azure Blob Storage (preview)

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[This article is prerelease documentation and is subject to change.]

Store data from your Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data in a Blob storage or use it to transfer your data to other applications.

Tip

Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse is a generally available service that offers seamless, continuous replication of data from Microsoft Dataverse to Azure Data Lake. We recommend that you use Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse instead of Customer Insights data-out exports for further data processing of the tables generated by Customer Insights like:

  • Unified customer profiles (msdynci_customerprofile)
  • Unified activities (msdynci_unifiedactivity)
  • Segment membership (msdynci_segmentmembership)
  • Customer attribute measures (msdynci_customermeasure)
  • Enrichment data (msdynci_enrichment)
  • Prediction model output (msdynci_prediction)

For more information on table schemas, see Tables in Customer Insights - Data

Prerequisites

Known limitations

Set up connection to Blob Storage

You must be an administrator in Customer Insights to add a connection.

  1. Go to Settings > Connections.

  2. Select Add connection and choose Azure Blob Storage.

  3. Give your connection a recognizable name in the Display name field. The name and the type of the connection describe this connection. We recommend choosing a name that explains the purpose and target of the connection.

  4. Choose who can use this connection. By default, it's only administrators. For more information, see Allow contributors to use a connection for exports.

  5. Enter Subscription, Resource group, Storage account, and Container for your Blob Storage account.

  6. Review the data privacy and compliance and select I agree.

  7. Select Save to complete the connection.

Configure an export

To configure this export, you must have permission for this connection type.

Important

If you turned on the soft delete setting for the Azure Blob Storage account, exports will fail. Turn off soft delete to export data to blobs.

  1. Go to Data > Exports.

  2. Select Add export.

  3. In the Connection for export field, choose a connection from the Azure Blob Storage section. Contact an administrator if no connection is available.

  4. Enter a name for the export.

  5. Enter the folder name for the Blob storage.

  6. Select the box next to each of the tables you want to export to this destination.

  7. Select Save.

Saving an export doesn't run the export immediately. The export runs with every scheduled refresh. You can also export data on demand.

Exported data is stored in the Blob Storage container you configured. The following folder paths are automatically created in your container:

  • For source tables and tables generated by the system:
    %ContainerName%/CustomerInsights_%instanceID%/%ExportDestinationName%/%TableName%/%Year%/%Month%/%Day%/%HHMM%/%TableName%_%PartitionId%.csv

    Example: Dynamics365CustomerInsights/CustomerInsights_abcd1234-4312-11f4-93dc-24f72f43e7d5/BlobExport/HighValueSegment/2020/08/24/1433/HighValueSegment_1.csv

    Tip

    Export of tables that contain a large amount of data can lead to multiple CSV files in the same folder for each export. Splitting exports happens for performance reasons to minimize the time it takes for an export to complete.

  • The model.json for the exported tables resides at the %ExportDestinationName% level.

    Example: Dynamics365CustomerInsights/CustomerInsights_abcd1234-4312-11f4-93dc-24f72f43e7d5/BlobExport/model.json