A journey through database heaven & hell (and other stuff)
Archive for the ‘Master Data Services’ Category.
The MSDEV people are about to launch a series of training courses for Master Data Services that covers early concepts, setup, model building, configuration, security model setup and the object model. This should be a great series and promises to be a solid introduction to the product.
Well, I finally got around to taking a look at R2 and specifically Master Data Services (due mostly to some strange decisions on my current data migration project).
First impressions – I actually quite like it. I can see that it is going to require some deep late-night learning to completely get my head around it all but it’s certainly not what I would call a Version 1 product (actually given that it’s born out of Stratature +EDM it’s more like version 4/5) . The new web based UI is pretty clunky though and for sure left me a little frustrated at times. However mosts of my other issues primarily centred around “de-nannying” Windows Server 2008 R2… all I can say (from a guy who likes to be fairly agile) is AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!
So here was the set up.
Virtual Server
SQL Server
Some things I needed to do for later on but may as well have done here
After the SQL Install, you need to run the MDS install from the SQL Install Media.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, I will point you to the msdn installation area and two excellent posts to get installed, web app configured (this took me a couple of attempts until I found Sutha’s article) and run in some test data to see how it works.
Baby Steps (Nick Barclay’s 7 step tutorials)
And the result was this
first hierarchy
One last useful link – when you are importing data, there are a set of error codes applied to the datasets (nice touch). The problem is that they are not documented anywhere (crap touch…attention to detail!!). The result, I spent a couple of hours looking for ERR210000 and what I might have done wrong only to find from Kirk’s helpful list that ERR210000 means “all is well” (great “ERR” can now mean “OK”)
Have a play…
I'm a Business Intelligence Architect/Developer. I spend my working life moving data to and from SQL Server, Analysis Services, Sharepoint and the rest of the Microsoft Office / BI stack & thought I'd share some stuff with others who may or may not be interested...