Microsoft Data Quality Services (DQS) enables you to automatically clean and standardize your organization’s data to improve business intelligence (BI) performance. Learn more about DQS now.
Companies are now storing and processing massive amounts of electronic information to help run and optimize their businesses, serve their customers, scale in both horizontal and vertical directions, and otherwise evolve to meet future needs and demands. This requires a highly adept, powerful platform and information structure in order to house and harness data.
There’s an old saying that’s been used in businesses of all kinds: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Data on its own is only as useful as your ability to interpret it and make appropriate business decisions based on it.
This is why data management and data quality products are so crucial to navigating, processing, preserving and utilizing business data. Especially when there is a massive amount of data to collect and extract value from, data quality tools create new efficiencies and generate more value from that data than manual strategies can.
In a growing data quality software market that is increasingly gaining new buyers, Microsoft Data Quality Services, or DQS, is a top platform that buyers should consider for their data management use cases.
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What is Microsoft Data Quality Services?
DQS is a SQL server product that is designed to manage data integrity and quality. It is a product that implements a knowledge base platform, which can perform data management, data cleansing, data matching and deduplication, and data profiling to analyze data and derive insights from it.
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DQS works on the concept of composite domains, which are structures that contain a set of data domains that share the same subject area, such as the following:
- Name: subsets of data include first name, middle name and family name
- Address: subsets of data include street, city, state, postal code and country
The following image illustrates how the knowledge bases and domains are correlated:
DQS is based upon parts of SQL Server — a Data Quality Server and Data Quality Client — which is a reliable and known quantity in the data management space with years of proven success.
DQS relies on cloud-based storage, thus eliminating the need for local storage. It is easy to use and depends on IIS as well as Azure for effective data management, so Azure operational and management knowledge is a key dependency for DQS.
What are the top features?
Microsoft DQS offers the following differentiating features for data quality management:
- Quick and easy deployment and usage, even for non-data experts.
- Data correction, standardization, cleansing, enrichment and deduplication.
- Profiling, which is integrated with data quality operational tasks that can help analyze and improve data integrity.
- Data management can be computer-assisted (automated) or manually handled via interactive methods.
- Metadata lets organizations learn about their stored information.
Benefits of using DQS in your business
Using a data quality management solution offers numerous benefits to companies that regularly work with data. These are some of the most significant benefits that DQS offers its customers:
- Proper data administration, which helps improve performance.
- Support for compliance requirements management.
- A cloud-based environment, which helps lower on-premises infrastructural requirements and eliminates the need for redundancy, backups and hands-on administration.
- Better business process agility and improved process outcomes.
DQS is highly reviewed by its customers, with numerous public testimonies that comment on its efficacy and usefulness. Even though DQS is easy to use right out of the gate, the tool is also supported by a significant network of technicians who are familiar with the product and have the right experience and skill sets to help you administer DQS.
Microsoft DQS pricing
DQS pricing information must be obtained directly from Microsoft or an authorized third-party reseller. It’s important to keep in mind that using Azure is also required in order to use DQS; Microsoft should be able to provide related pricing details for this product as well when you request information about DQS.
To learn more about Microsoft DQS pricing, features and how the tool could potentially work in your business, check out the Microsoft DQS product page here.
