Idempotency
The property of an integration operation where running it multiple times produces the same result as running it once — essential for safe retries in distributed systems.
Idempotency is the property of an operation where running it multiple times produces the same result as running it once. Essential for Dynamics 365 integrations because distributed systems retry — network timeouts, webhook redeliveries, Service Bus retries all produce duplicate message arrivals. A non-idempotent integration receiving the same event twice creates duplicate records, double-charges customers, sends repeated notifications. Patterns for idempotency: Upsert with alternate key (Dataverse's natural idempotency for record creation), check-before-create (query for existence first; acceptable at low volume), correlation IDs (track processed event IDs and skip duplicates), natural keys (business identifiers that detect duplicates inherently). Design every integration for idempotency; the cost is small, the protection is substantial.