SSIS Junkie : MDS, sql server

First sighting of SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS)

jamiet — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:47:48 GMT

I’m at SQLBits 5 today and I’ve just come out of Ian Marriott’s session where he talked about the forthcoming Master Data Services. Here’s a low-quality (sorry) photo of the screen that MDS practitioners and users are going to become very familiar with, the home screen of MDS’ web interface:

My first impressions are that this is a reskinned version of Stratature (i.e. the previous incarnation of this product) and that should surprise no-one. I didn’t see anything that I hadn’t seen already in Stratature 18 months ago but then it wasn’t possible for Ian to show much in such a short session so I’m sure there’s more to see (in fact I’ve already spoken about some of it).

I’ve nothing more to show say about this right now, I just figured some people might be interested in what this thing might look like. More to come later, I promise!

@Jamiet

MDS is x64 only

jamiet — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:02:28 GMT

Just a short post to make people aware that Master Data Services (MDS), the forthcoming Master Data Management solution in SQL Server 2008 R2, is available for x64 architectures only. Sergei Ivanov from the MDS explains the reasons for this at Where is MDS?:

Understand the motivations, folks. Instead of dispersing resources on testing and support of several processor architectures, we chose x64 as a matter of focus. This is the platform in the data center and for the last several months I've also been running 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop (Dell Precision M6400).
MDS will also run on 64-bit edition of Windows 7, but having the server OS gives me the ability to run SharePoint 2010 in addition to SQL engine and MDS.

I can understand the justification but its not great news for those that want to poke and prod at the software and learn how to use it (e.g. me)!

@Jamiet