Specifications
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C H A P T E R 7
Master Data Services
M
icrosoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services (MDS) is another new technology
in the SQL Server family and is based on software from Microsoft’s acquisition of
Stratature in 2007. Just as SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is an extensible reporting
platform that ships with ready-to-use applications for end users and administrators, MDS
is both an extensible master data management platform and an application for develop-
ing, managing, and deploying master data models. MDS is included with the Datacenter,
Enterprise, and Developer editions of SQL Server 2008 R2.
Master Data Management
In the simplest sense, master data refers to nontransactional reference data. Put an-
other way, master data represents the business entities—people, places, or things—that
participate in a transaction. In a data mart or data warehouse, master data becomes
dimensions. Master data management is the set of policies and procedures that you
use to create and maintain master data in an effort to overcome the many challenges
associated with managing master data. Because it’s unlikely that a single set of policies
and procedures would apply to all master data in your organization, MDS provides the
exibility you need to accommodate a wide range of business requirements related to
master data management.
Master Data Challenges
As an organization grows, the number of line-of-business applications tends to increase.
Furthermore, data from these systems ows into reporting and analytical solutions.
Often, the net result of this proliferation of data is duplication of data related to key
business entities, even though each system might maintain only a subset of all possible
data for any particular entity type. For example, customer data might appear in a sales
application, a customer relationship management application, an accounting application,
and a corporate data warehouse. However, there might be elds maintained in one ap-
plication that are never used in the other applications, not to mention information about
customers that might be kept in spreadsheets independent of any application. None of
the systems individually provide a complete view of customers, and the multiple systems
quite possibly contain conicting information about specic customers.