Master Data Services

Recently announced to be released in SQL2008 R2 Master data services tackles the rapidly escalating issues of dimension coordination, integration and reconciliation that enterprises face with each incremental year of systems evolution.

Enterprises have implemented their own special blend of ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence, Financial Reporting, Planning, and other operational systems in order to accommodate unique business requirements. As their information system landscape evolves, enterprise dimension management becomes critical to ensuring accuracy and consistency across the portfolio of systems.

Each of these systems requires the same dimensional information to operate, yet they manage this information independently, which directly affects dimensional synchronization and reconciliation across systems. Addressing these redundant efforts is the first step to ensuring coherent and correct data.

Recent legislation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley in the United States and new international accounting standards, has driven many enterprises to evaluate their enterprise dimension management strategy for the first time. However, the issues associated with dimension management have impacted businesses for years.

MDS provides a controlled, process-driven environment for collaborative dimensional management and enforces consistency, accuracy and integrity throughout the enterprise and across heterogeneous business intelligence systems such as Microsoft Analysis Services, Hyperion Essbase, Cognos PowerPlay and Applix TM1. Additionally, integration is supported across relational warehouse and marting databases such as Teradata, SQL Server, DB2 and Oracle.