Matching with Master Data Services, DQS and SSIS

If you have an MDM requirement to consolidate multiple sources of Master Data together into a single golden record, then you have a few different ways to achieve this on the Microsoft platform. This blog post gives an overview of the different ways that various matching methods can be used in conjunction with Master Data Services for consolidation in Master Data Management, outlining the pros and cons of each option. In summary, the options are:

• Data Quality Services (DQS)
• SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
• Plus Master Data Services itself has a few (not that well known) matching capabilities

Data Quality Services

A key requirement in all but the simplest MDM solutions is that the matching/consolidation must be carried out in an automated manner, with a Data Steward alerted to take action if needed (e.g. the matching engine incorrectly matches two customers, the Data Steward opens MDS and corrects this). This scenario would be hard to achieve with DQS, as it’s possible to automate the DQS cleaning, but it’s not possible to automate the DQS matching. This is something that I’ve raised connect issues about, here and here.

If your data to be matched into MDS is not coming in on a daily basis, and you therefore need to do more ad-hoc matching to produce your golden Master Data records, then DQS could be for you. The MDS Excel Add-in will give you the capability of matching data that you import into Excel with MDS members, harnessing the power of DQS. An overview of how this works is available here.

Integration Services

SSIS has been around for a long time now and, as many of you will know, contains fuzzy matching components. With the right MDS model design, its possible to carry out a batch based fuzzy match between your master records and end up with a mapping between your the records that exist in your source systems and your MDS golden records. The rough conceptual steps to do this are:

1. Load the new and changed records from the source systems into a staging area.
2. Clean and standardise your data. This is actually something that DQS cleaning can help with.
3. Query your staging area to get the new records that you want to insert/update into Master Data Services.
4. Now the question arises, do we have an exact or close match for these records already in MDS? While the exact matches are easy to deal with, use the SSIS Fuzzy Lookup component to establish whether there are any approximate matches.
5. Link the source records to master records (if the match is high enough) using MDS Domain Attributes.
6. Carry out appropriate inserts and updates into MDS using the MDS staging tables.
7. Ensure that a Data Steward is alerted in some way if necessary (e.g. if the match threshold is below x% confidence). This can be done with Email or MDS Notifications, for example.

This process can run in batch overnight, with the Data Steward approving or rejecting the matches that SSIS has carried out the following morning. Whilst the above over-simplifies the process and technical work required, hopefully the process makes sense at a high level.

Master Data Services

Although you cannot feed MDS your source data and get it to automatically carry out matching for you, it does actually contain the raw components in order to do this. By this I mean the MDS database contains an assembly called Microsoft.MasterDataServices.DataQuality, which gives you a number of fuzzy matching T-SQL functions. These are called from the MDS front end when you carry out some filtering when viewing entities. Using them just for filtering in the front end really isn’t using the functions to their true capability, but thankfully you can use these functions in your own code.

You can use the MDS T-SQL functions in a similar way to the conceptual SSIS method outlined above, in order to match and eliminate duplicates. In addition, the MDS web API can also be used to carry out a fuzzy match, as mentioned in this forum post. Retrieving match candidates using a web service may be an attractive option if you’re trying to do real time MDM.

Conclusion

Essentially until it’s possible to automate DQS matching, we have a choice between SSIS and the MDS matching functions. The following e-book gives a very detailed overview of the matches that both are capable of doing. The MDS T-SQL functions are more flexible than the SSIS fuzzy components as you can choose what fuzzy algorithm you want to use, but the SSIS components let you choose between Fuzzy Grouping and Fuzzy Lookup out of the box, without having to write SQL. Although I tend find that both give very good matching results, the MDS T-SQL functions produce slightly better matches in my experience, plus give you the option of trying different algorithms to suit different scenarios.

It’s also worth mentioning that Profisee Maestro (full disclosure, we are a partner) integrates with MDS, offering its own matching algorithms. Maestro also has a front end with the ability to assist with survivorship and approval, which I think is a useful addition to MDS. Speaking of survivorship and approval, there are two options in MDS out-of-the box. The new Master Data Manager web front-end is much improved, but potentially the MDS Excel Add-In allows a bit more flexibility for survivorship carried out by a Data Steward, just due to its natural ability for filling/copying/pasting/filtering.

So overall, due to the various improvements, Master Data Services is now capable of tackling more complex MDM scenarios than in the 2008 R2 version.