Better Data with Metadata

  • Article

Metadata (data about data) is becoming increasingly popular not just to meet ever more stringent auditing requirements for business intelligence projects, but also to enable accelerated development and maintenance. 

The challenge is to deliver rich metadata as part of a  BI project with minimal overhead and to keep it up to date.  So I was pleased to find this white paper on how to use SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), to make this as painless as possible.

The idea is to have a dedicated metadata repository which drives programmatically driven SSIS packages like this:

Click here for larger image

I think this paper will have an even bigger impact than the project Real resources that came out with SQL Server 2005 and as definitely worth half an hour of your time to understand the principles and approach.

Technorati Tags: Metata,SQL Server,Integration Services

 

Note (20/04/2009): this post has been superceded by a later one, https://blogs.technet.com/andrew/archive/2009/04/20/metadata-in-the-microsoft-bi-stack.aspx as there is a new metadata toolkit available at

https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SqlServerMetadata/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1174 replacing the resources mentioned in this article.