A lot of what is typically discussed in regards to Master Data Services (MDS) revolves around either the Silverlight web-based interface or the Excel plug-in. What’s not often discussed are the back-end integrations scenarios for loading, extracting (querying) and the otherwise day-to-day management or reporting requirements a Master Data solution might involve. In this post, we will look at common integration scenarios and techniques for handling each within MDS.

Loading Data (Batch)

Out-of-the-box MDS has facilities to stage and easily load data in batch. For each entity (and hierarchy) you create, a staging table is also created. For leaf members the staging table takes the form of:

stg.<Entity Name>_Leaf

Data is then loaded directly to the table using a SSIS package or any other tool capable of writing to a SQL Server table. When all the data is loaded the batch can be started programmatically using calling a stored procedure…