Data Quality Services is the new data cleansing tool provided in SQL Server 2012 Enterprise and BI Editions. DQS is a knowledge-driven solution that enables you to do data cleansing and matching through the DQS client, or automated cleansing through the DQS Cleansing transform in SSIS.

In this blog post I will show how to install DQS. When you first install SQL Server, there are two DQS options to select if you would like to use DQS. As shown here, the top option (Instance Features\Data Quality Services) will install the DQS Server files. The second option (Shared Features\Data Quality Client) will install the DQS client.

Once you have the DQS files available from the SQL Server install, the next step is to run the DQS Installer. This can be found under the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 menu under Data Quality Services. Click on the Data Quality Server Installer.

This will launch a command prompt window and start the install. As seen here, you will need to enter in a Database Master Key password.

The install will continue and take on average about 7 minutes to finish. Once it finishes, you will be presented with a final message stating that DQS Installer finished sucessfully, press any key to continue. Simply press any key and the window will close.

Congratulations, you now have the DQS server installed!

After doing a refresh on the database list in management studio, we can see there are now three new DQS databases that have been installed.

DQS_MAIN – Includes DQS stored procedures, the DQS engine, and published knowledge bases.
DQS_PROJECTS – Includes data that is required for knowledge base management and DQS project activities.
DQS_STAGING_DATA – Similar to tempdb.

While knowing about these databases is helpful, all of the DQS work will primarlily be done using the DQS client tool. This tool can be found in the same menu location where the DQS server install was located. When you launch the Data Quality Client tool you will be presented with a prompt to connect to the DQS server.

Enter the instance location where DQS was installed and click Connect. You are now logged into the DQS client and will see the main screen.

On the left side is where you work with Knowledge Bases. The middle section is for creating projects to do data cleansing and data matching. The right side is for Administration tasks. These will each be discussed further in future posts, but you should now at least have DQS installed and ready to go.