When creating a new Dataverse table, why does it come with automatic columns?

Question

I am new to Dataverse, moving from the SQL Server world, and just created my first Dataverse table (Standard table). Upon creation, the table has lots of what I assume are automatically-added columns? These include "Owner", "Status", "Version Number". I come from the SQL Server background where new tables come "empty", with no columns. I do not think I need these automatically-added columns (this is just going to be a small log table that holds datetime, action, etc. columns).

Would it break anything if these automatically-added columns were deleted? Also, if anyone could provide information about why these columns are included, that would help. I have researched these questions online, but found very little. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

They are standard, out of the box attributes that you can't remove.

You can change the Ownership within the Table Type to "Organization" when creating the table to remove the Owner however the rest are created as part of every table.

There is some high level detail on the docs https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/data-platform/entity-overview

Answer 2

Dataverse (earlier called as Common Data service) is Dynamics CRM under the hood. It’s a SaaS model CRM online software comes with some basic fundamental components.

When you create a table (entity) it comes with columns (attributes), relationships, views, forms, dashboards, etc.

The UCI model driven app can be made quickly to include these components with all CRUD operations without any code by doing simple configuration and customization.

To support these barebone functionalities - the necessary attributes like name, currency, statecode, statuscode, createdby, createdon, modifiedby, modifiedon and security implication fields like owner, owning business unit, owning team and change tracking & concurrency fields like row version, etc will be created.

You can keep them aside as they are part of platform and do your customization as you need.