Having received the outline of where Microsoft is taking their very exiting acquisition, and tried the product in a prior beta version (+EDM), I feel the urge to write a little about +EDM and its connectivity. How agile it is communicating with the surrounding systems on the corporate platform.

It seems obvious when using the +EDM that it’s designed for having SOE/SOR very centralised. Should one strategy be otherwise, it does offer views exposing data out of the repository, And likewise for data input it offers a table where one can batch load data from. In this blog I will try to elaborate why I believe it will fall very short on this front.

Before data can be exported out from +EDM it has to meet the rules defined. And this thought is good however. In the current state of +EDM executing rules is very slow rules while they are row based. With a surprising low amount of rules and not that many rows it takes very long time to validate your data. This cripples us building up complex rules determining the completeness level of data, and basing or determination of synchronization on this.

Mapping to external systems, like SAP seems very primitively supported. By adding the Business key from SAP as an attribute in your MDM it allows the user to manually maintain a simple link to your CODE which is the +EDM internal key.  What about gearing in hierarchies? Is a manual procedure here not error prune?

Complex workflow where data has to be validated by various people seems likewise hard to implement. However this might be possible with changing rights on data. Still it seems very crude and not agile enough for a modern MDM workflow setup.

Most annoyingly is +EDM batch input/output strategy. Near real-time is what most modern MDM synchronization strategies sough’s after. Having a table where data may or may not be imported from and reading the status of the import is really inflexible.

This sounds dreadful negative, but it really isn’t. +EDM is a very exiting product which really addresses a lack in the Microsoft suite when it comes to MDM. Taking into account this is a prior beta version I’ve been testing out I am sure when the final product reaches RTM it will be much improved on this front.

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[FieldUse]

@field sysname,

@value sysname

AS

BEGIN

DECLARE @SQL NVARCHAR(MAX)

SET @SQL=''

SELECT @SQL=@SQL+'SELECT '''+s.NAME+''' AS [Schema],'''+t.NAME+''' AS [Table], '''+COALESCE([collation_name],'')+''' AS [collation_name] ' +',COUNT(*) AS Occurrences FROM ['+s.[NAME]+'].['+t.NAME+'] WHERE ['+@field+']='''+@value+''';'

FROM sys.columns c

JOIN sys.tables t

ON c.object_id = t.object_id

JOIN sys.schemas s

ON t.schema_id = s.schema_id

WHERE c.name = @field

ORDER BY s.name ,t.NAME;

EXEC sp_executesql @SQL

END