Matching with DQS

Often, you need to match entities without having a common identification. For example, you might get data about customers from two different sources. Then you need to do the matching based on similarity of attributes, for example, names and addresses. Matching is a very complex task. In SQL Server, DQS is one of the tools that can help you with this task.

Getting ready

In order to test the DQS matching, you need to prepare some data. The following section contains a lot of code; therefore, you might want to use the code provided in the book's companion content.

First, you need to prepare a table with clean data. In SSMS, execute the following code:

-- Preparing the clean data table
USE DQS_STAGING_DATA;
CREATE TABLE dbo.CustomersClean
(
CustomerKey INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,\
FullName NVARCHAR(200) NULL,
StreetAddress NVARCHAR(200) NULL
);
GO
-- Populating the clean data table
INSERT INTO dbo.CustomersClean
(CustomerKey, FullName, StreetAddress)
SELECT CustomerKey,
FirstName...