PL-900 Practice Question: Demonstrate the capabilities of Power Automate
A company uses Power Automate to process invoices. A cloud flow is triggered when a new row is added to a Microsoft Dataverse table. The flow must retrieve related customer information from another Dataverse table and then update the invoice row with a calculated risk score. The flow runs but fails at the step that updates the invoice. The error message indicates that the record is currently locked by another process. What is the most likely cause of this failure?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming the failure is a permissions or configuration issue, when the error message explicitly indicates a record lock caused by concurrent access.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The flow is trying to update a record that is locked by another transaction, such as a plugin or another flow.
Dataverse uses record-level locking to maintain data consistency. When one process, such as a plugin or another flow run, is updating a record, other processes attempting to update the same record may fail with a lock error. To resolve this, you can implement retry policies on the action, reduce concurrency, or coordinate the processes so they do not contend for the same record. The other options describe permission, trigger, or connection issues that would produce different error messages.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The flow uses a personal connection instead of a service principal, causing session conflicts.
Why it's wrong here
Using a personal connection versus a service principal affects ownership and lifecycle, not record locking. Both connection types can encounter locks if another transaction holds the record. The error message points to a concurrency issue, so the connection type is not the cause. Switching to a service principal would not resolve a lock conflict.
- ✓
The flow is trying to update a record that is locked by another transaction, such as a plugin or another flow.
Why this is correct
Dataverse enforces optimistic concurrency and record-level locking. If another process, such as a synchronous plugin or a concurrent flow run, holds a lock on the invoice record, the update step will fail with a lock error. This matches the symptom exactly. The resolution is to add retry logic or ensure the conflicting process releases the lock before the update.
- ✗
The flow's connection to Dataverse uses an account without write privileges on the invoice table.
Why it's wrong here
If the connection account lacked write privileges, the error would typically be an authorization or permissions error, not a record lock error. The scenario states the failure is due to a lock, which points to concurrency rather than security. While permissions should always be verified, they are not the cause described here.
- ✗
The Dataverse trigger is misconfigured and is firing multiple times for the same record.
Why it's wrong here
A misconfigured trigger might cause duplicate runs, but the error is specifically about a locked record during the update, not about duplicate executions. Even if the trigger fired multiple times, each run would still encounter the lock if another process holds it. The root cause is concurrency, not trigger configuration.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Microsoft exam blueprint
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