asked
Master Data Services import/export functionality
Does MDS allow you to create some mechanism to extract data from your source systems into the master data tables? Does MDS allow you to create some mechanism to push data from your master data tables down to other databases? I was expecting that after setting up the master data models and business rules, MDS would allow me to define the mappings from the source databases to the master data models and automatically generate an SSIS package (or something like that), and similarly for pushing data back down to the source systems. But from what I can gather, it is still up to me to write my own SSIS packages/stored procedures/whatever to populate the mdm staging tables, and more SSIS packages/stored procedures/whatever to take data and push down to source systems. If anyone has more experience with this, I'd me pleased to hear your comments.
Master Data Services is meant as a mechanism to feed multiple systems from a single system. It doesn't really provide a means of pulling data from the other systems back. As a matter of fact, that's more or less a violation of how Master Data Services should work (although there is a staging mechanism, testing proved it to be problematic after the initial data load). It should always push and you shouldn't modify the data separate from the MDS data. If your situation is such that you're going to be modifying that data, then you shouldn't use MDS. We looked into it and decided not to use it for this reason. It was just going to be too difficult to manage. As far as distributing the data, you do have to define the subscriptions, but once they're defined, the key is, that you don't have to do anything else to get data out to all the subscribers. The setup and deployment is on your shoulders, but the automation occurs later.
