I’ve installed both DQS and MDS several times, but often had trouble trying to integrate Master Data Services (MDS) with Data Quality Services (DQS). By integrating MDS and DQS, you gain the ability to do data matching on your MDS data. Sounds cool enough, right? In this post I will show how to integrate these two tools and enable a couple of DQS options when using MDS.

First, let’s run through the typical worst case scenario. After installing MDS, the very last step is that long button which enables DQS Integration.

Clicking this button, the install program looks in the same SQL Server Instance which you just installed MDS into and searches for a database called DQS_MAIN. If you haven’t yet installed DQS, it will fail and you will get the following error message.

If you installed MDS before installing DQS, all hope is not lost. After installing MDS, simply install DQS and then come back into the MDS Configuration screen and enable DQS integration.
Now when you can click the ‘Enable DQS Integration’ button, you should get a success message.

Ok, so we have both installed and they have been integrated. Now let’s take a look at our new found powers. If we fire up Excel and click on the ‘Master Data’ tab, you can see that we now have access to the Data Quality tools as well!

With these tools, we can now utilize the matching rules which we can setup in DQS.

Without integrating DQS with MDS, you can see here in this ‘before’ screenshot that the DQS tools are not available.

(If you don’t have the MDS Add-in for excel, you can download it here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219530)

Here is a video tutorial on how to use the DQS tools with MDS:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/hh828790.aspx

Here is a link which describes using Data Quality Matching in the MDS Add-in for Excel:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh548681.aspx