Cleaning, Validating, and Enhancing the SQL Server Data Warehouse Contact Dimension
We collect contact data from several sources. You can collect contacts at trade shows or through your website. You can also purchase contact lists. It is common for contact data to be incomplete and unstandardized. Cleaning, validating, and standardizing the data can be challenging.
Contacts can include existing customers as well as prospects in a SQL Server Data Warehouse. The Contact dimension’s goal is to provide clean, valid, and up-to-date contact information that can be used to communicate with contacts via email, mail, and phone, as well as analyze the contacts based on demographic information.
Unfortunately, the built-in SSIS components cannot provide you with the data cleansing, validation, and enhancement of demographic data that you require. It is possible to create script components for these types of tasks using .NET code in SSIS. Is there a way to validate, enhance, and clean up the Contact dimension without writing code?
Solution
The Contact dimension in your SQL Server data warehouse can be cleaned, validated, and enhanced with Melissa’s tools. To accomplish this task, Melissa’s suite of SSIS Data Quality Components can be used.
With Melissa SSIS components, you simply drag and drop them onto your Data Flow, configure the component properties, and you’re ready to go. No coding is required.
Melissa SSIS provides many capabilities, including:
- Importing data into SQL Server
- In business, poor data quality is costly
- Removing SQL Server duplicates
- Fixing out-of-date SQL Server data
- Verifying SQL Server data
Melissa SSIS Components
A Melissa SSIS component is placed in the SSIS Data Flow. The SSIS data source can be any SSIS data source, and the results can be output to any SSIS data destination. Configuration capabilities are very flexible. Depending on your needs, you can customize the many options available, as you will see in later sections. You can save your configuration for future use.
The most important thing you should keep in mind is that SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages should be able to incorporate domain-specific knowledge about Contact data while being easy to implement in unscripted ways.
