HomeMDS/MDMMaster Data Services (MDS): Miscellaneous tips

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Master Data Services (MDS): Miscellaneous tips — 41 Comments

  1. Hi James,
    Did you do an evaluation of the pro/cons betweew Microsoft SQL Serve and MDS? If so can you share your findings.
    Thanks,
    Frank

  2. James,
    Thanks for getting back so soon.
    Looling for the difference between MDS (new product) and using an industrial strength application like SQL Server to impliment an MDM solution
    thanks

  3. Is functionality available in the MDS Web UI that is similar to the “Publish” in the Excel Add-In?
    We would like the user to batch his changes in the UI and then click Publish or something to start our notification process. We don’t want to be notified for every change.
    Thanks

  4. Hi James,

    I am using MDS to do some heavy data management on a dataset in around 130000 records. My problem is that the Excell add-in is awfull slow when loading the data. Is there any way to speed up the loading other than work with a smaller dataset?

    Best Regards
    Kenneth

  5. Hi
    I have a question about staging: i have two rows with the same code, i want to load both of them into MDS UI, but MDS staging will not accept the same member code twice. How should I solve it?
    For instance:
    Code: 12345, Attribute1: 001
    Code:12345, Attibute2:002
    I want to load both rows together at the same time.

      • Hi
        Thanks for your reply. I am new with MDS, so I am not sure how to transform the data to get both Attribute changes on to the one line.

        Data source(code:12345, type:001; code:12345, type:002)–>conditional split( Code==Code)–>match output->derived column(create new column: type2)
        Am I right?

  6. Hi James,

    I have been looking at MDS for a specific name-maintenance task and I have worked out how it can cover every requirement except one. If somebody changes the name of a member (same thing, different name), can I use MDS to to see this? I need to report from an anther database and would need both names for continuity using MDS as the reference source.

  7. James, Quick question regarding “change tracking entities attributes” and their relationship to Data Warehouse Type 2 Dimensions. Unless I am missing something MDS cannot support pulishing the changes via views with a datatime stamp. so it would seem the best way to accomplish this is to insert a custom process thta will take the published view (MDS) and update the Data Warehouse Dimension (Type 2) , in essence manually.

  8. Hi James,

    Are you familiar with the email notification functionality tied to business rule validation. Have you set this up in the past at your organization?

  9. Hi James,

    End users would like to capture all the changes to any attributes within an entity.
    Currently in the DB I see any change to the attribute value, the record gets updated with User ID and Data-time stamp.
    I am trying explore in MDS 2008 to see if its possible to set up a SCD Type-2?
    Capture every change in a separate record in the DB.

    thanks,
    Susheel

  10. Hi James,

    I am working on a MDS project that utilizes the Excel add-on as the UI tool for the business users. One of the attributes is domain based, and both the name and code both show up in the same column in Excel (in this case it is store name and store #).

    The business users want these separated into two columns so they can sort/filter by either store name or store number. Is there a way to separate this domain attribute into two columns in the Excel add-on?

    Thanks,

    Tony

    • As it is a Domain attribute, the code cannot be changed in the referenced entity, so the Name/Code (or just the name is an option) is displayed as there is only one column/Attribute in that Entity.
      If they can see both Name and Code in the text displayed, can they not still filter on either ?

  11. Do you know if it is possible to assign different attributes from different entities to the same change attribute group? Or is it only possible to assign several attributes to the same change attribute group, if they are in the same entity?

  12. Thanks for the tips! Any idea how to change the display value of a domain attribute so that it’s not the code value? I have a self-referencing entity and one of the attributes (ParentID) is restricted to the existing records in the entity. But it only displays the code value and I can’t find where to select a display value for the drop-down.
    Thanks!

  13. How can I alleviate this error? 229: A database error has occurred. Contact your system administrator. This occurred after my password changed, and I had to update the account under IIS with the new password. I was able to add and view my model before the password change, now I cant! Help!

  14. Hi James,

    Is there a way to hide the name and code columns in the Excel add-in?
    Setting the pixel width to 0 works to hide other columns, but not name and code.

    Many Thanks,
    Colin

  15. Hi James,

    I want to lock the add/edit options of only certain attributes. Please let me know if there are any options to do that.

    Thank you,
    Aravindan Rajamani

  16. James,
    I am trying to create a business rule in MDS- the combination of 2 columns in the entity must be unique and no duplicates are allowed. I tried all the possible ways but when I try to save it MDS throws a error.
    Could you let me know can we assign this business rule on MDS entity or not.

    Thanks

  17. Hi there. James, what is the best and fastest way to get a lot of records into an entity? I know you can do this via the Excel add-in but this is OK to a point… If you’ve got hundreds of thousands of records, this becomes almost close to impossible. Is there a better way? I have heard about the staging tables but never tried this. Would you point me—if this is *the* way—to some easy-to-follow guide on this? Thanks.

  18. hi,
    When using the web api of MDS to get the entity member, it can only get 50 data. How can I get the whole entity data?

  19. Hi,
    I have a custom developed application that uses MDS API to enter data into database. I want to enter only those records that are new. If a record already exists with one or two attributes different then I want to update the existing record in database with these new values. I found out that EntityMembersMerge does a similar thing what I want to do but couldn’t understand how it does. Can you explain how to do it with the use of EntityMembersMerge function?

  20. Pingback:SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) Tips and Tricks – WebProfIT Consulting

  21. Hi

    In response to the new capability to filter a DBA, I am struggling to use this feature to solve a scenario that I am sure many find themselves in. We plan to make wide use of DBA type drop downs to enforce data integrity on some of our main master data entities. Take for example a fictitious client entity that has Gender, Race, Education Level, and Religion. Each of these has a finite list of available values for capture and we don’t want to have these as free format fields because typos and different spelling might cause havoc with our data integrity. So before the new filtering feature came in, we would have to create 4 DBA lists in Master data services, making this 5 separate master data entities to maintain. It would be much easier if we had a common entity which allows us to capture name/value combinations and separate these into different grouping via a third attribute called “Group”. Then when we define the main customer entity, we could make the DBA entry point to the common list and filtered by the “Group” attribute. I was hoping that this new filtering feature would solve this problem but it seems that if you want this to work, you have to have another drop down preceding each of the 4 drop downs to allow the user to select the group to filter on before the second drop down is filtered by the first selected value. I even tried to make use of setting the display width to zero to hide the first drop down and then use a business rule to default to the desired value to almost make the first drop down “hard coded” to the desired group but could not get this right.

    Is anyone also having this requirement and found a better way to do this or will this go down as a new feature to be added at some undetermined time in the future.

    Help!

  22. Hi,

    Is it possible to have an entity A where:
    a) main columns (Name, Code, Parent – recursive) are visible for all users
    b) extra columns (Country, Profit) are:
    – DENY for all users by default
    – UPDATE for specific country officers ( users based on Derived Hierarchy (“Country” based).

  23. I have composite key for my entity, i tried various biz rule like must be unique, concat values in the code field, all are throwing error, can you post some samples/screenshot
    please
    Must be unique -In combination with following
    Errors : SQL2012 MDS : The attribute reference matches more than one attribute
    SQL2016 MDS : No errors but the rule picks only the first attribute after saving

    when i use the Default to a concatenated value on the code column
    Errors : 2012 MDS : The attribute object with an id doesnot exists or access is denied
    2016 MDS : A default value cannot be set for the Code attribute. Edit the entity to enable automatically generated Code values

  24. Hi,
    I am trying to purge(hard delete) all data(717452 records) from one of the MDS entity.
    This is part of our requirement .I ran the stored procedure ,after updating the importtype to 6 in the staging table and importstatus_id to 0.
    The process is running

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