Master Data Management and Data Quality Ebook - Download FREE

Data Quality and Master Data Management are a common and very huge exercises in terms of implementation within any organization.

Any enterprise would have a collection of applications for its various business and internal operations. Every application cannot be expected to be designed or readily available, such that is standardizes each piece of information. At some level, free form textual input would be made available for business needs. This is the first point where data quality issues makes its first step. Lack of standardization and integration between different applications for capturing information that is common across applications leads to inconsistent data, which is another point that stimulates data quality issues. Profiling data to identify the areas of your data repositories that are lack data quality, and devising the cleansing policy to rectify data quality issues is collectively known as data cleansing process. Fuzzy lookup transform, Data Profile Viewer and task are SSIS gadgets in SQL Server 2008 R2 that can aid in dealing with data quality issues.

Master Data Management is a very very sensitive exercise and need extensive domain knowledge and research in the business for which its intended, and there are full fledged software suites just for this purpose. This activity is a common exercise in any systems integration programme. Even when you are accumulating information from various sources for your ETL loads, you would need to maintain a temporary / permanent staging environment to manage common master data from these source systems, before you start processing transactional data. Though this master data management is functionally different from MDM carried out during a system integration programme, but technically more or less they are similar exercises. Master Data Services is the SQL Server offering which is in very initial stages (in my personal viewpoint) to help users deal with MDM exercise upto an extent.

A new free ebook is available from Solid Quality Mentors, which describes the above mentioned content, and the ways to implement it using SQL Server 2008 R2 tools. This book can be downloaded from here. I wish that this book should have come a little late, then it might have covered SQL Server Data Quality Services which is the upcoming offering in the Data Quality area from SQL Server Denali.