In this chapter, we had a quick look at Data Quality Service, which is a part of Microsoft SQL Server 2014. This service provides cleansing based on a Knowledge Base. The data steward can define and maintain Knowledge Bases, and create and modify matching policies. Data quality projects can be created directly from the data quality client tool, from SSIS with the DQS cleansing component, or from the data quality components in the MDS Excel Add-In. DQS is a powerful tool to clean data before loading it into data warehouses, to ensure data consistency, and clean different datasets.

When the quality of data is high, we can use data mining algorithms to identify data patterns and do descriptive and predictive analyses. The next two chapters describe how to work with data mining technologies in Microsoft SQL Server.