Beginning Master Data Services (Part 1 of 7)

Like many other geeks out there I learn by doing. One of the things on my todo list has been to get familiar with MDS. During my experimentation with the recently released CTP I figured I'd take some notes on what I learned. These notes have evolved into a series of posts that will walk through some of the basics in putting MDS to work.

At this point we're only in the first public CTP, but everyone's just a bit curious to kick the MDS tires a bit. We all know there's quite a lot of functionality baked into the product in terms of workflow, versioning, web services and APIs but how about just the basics. These posts act as a quick start to see MDS in action. Once you’ve put some data into the system you can pull back the covers and have a look at how it happened and where the data is. We all learn something that way.

The walkthroughs will go through the creation of a very simple Geography MDS model based on the data contained in the DimGeography table in the SQL 2008R2 release of the AdventureWorks DW database. In the posts to follow we will walk through the following:

• Creating a Model
• Creating Entities
• Creating Attributes
• Loading Members & Attributes
• Creating a Derived Hierarchy
• Getting at the Data with TSQL

All posts assume that you have already installed MDS and have the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 DB set up on the same server.

On to Creating a Model