Customer Address revisited

Recently two new features were introduced to dataverse that allows us to better manage customer addresses. A few years ago (2012) I wrote an article on the subject (https://community.dynamics.com/blogs/post/?postid=b889a366-d3fb-4b39-bdb9-7f3716283d4c) which goes into some detail about how the customeraddress table works. This post will revisit some of that and also discuss how the two new features regarding the customeraddress can help us better manage our data.

Here is a detailed link from Microsoft regarding the customer address table. It is well worth reading this to understand how the system handles customer addresses.
Customer tables (account, contact, and customeraddress) (Microsoft Dataverse) – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

To make this a bit shorter, the addresses of accounts and contacts are not stored in these tables but actually in a special table called customeraddress. This is hidden to most user operations but it does show up in some cases, for instance in storage calculations in PPAC. The same goes for the lead table which has a special leadaddress table that supports that.

With the default settings, for every account, you will get 2 customer addresses, and for every contact you will get 3 customer addresses. Lead has two addresses and hece will have two records of lead addresses.

This can start becoming an issue if you have lots of these base records, contact, account or leads, which are more or less empty. So even if there is no address data on these records, they will still have these supporting records and all records in dataverse will take up some storage, based on the fact that there are some fields that always are created like modifiedon, createdon, modifiedby etc. Typical scenario where this can start becoming an issue is if you are using dataverse for marketing and you have several million leads to whom you send newsletters but don’t really know that much more about them. With 1 million leads, you will get 2 million empty lead addresses.

So, what is new? The new functionality Microsoft have released are two features. The first feature is that the customeraddress or leadaddress records are not created until there is actually information that needs to be stored in these records. This is generally a good setting to be set to true, as storing more or less empty records isn’t really very useful.

If you have an existing system with 2 million contacts and 4 million leads, this will however not remove the existing customeraddresses (6 million) and leadaddresses (8 million) that are empty. For this, there is the second new feature which allows you to remove customeraddresses without removing the contact/account/lead. There is, of course a workaroud for this, and that is to create a new contact/account/lead with the first feature switched on, hence not creating any address records, and then merging this record with the old one and finally removing the old deactivated records. It is, however, much easier to solve it with just removing the address records.

Before running anything like this, make sure you make a forced backup of your instance. I have seen onprem systems where there are lacking address records and that is just very very weird.

Hope this helps explaing a bit about how this functionality works.

Original Post https://powerplatform.se/customer-address-revisited/