On Late May when CTP 2.0 of SQL Server 2016 published, I’ve wrote a blog post about What’s New in MDS 2016. Recently CTP 2.2 has been published, and I’ve seen some new features again added to MDS. In this post I’ll explain new features of MDS 2016 CTP 2.2 which are;

• Entity Sync
• SCD Type 2 Support
• Compound Key Index Support

Entity Sync

With this feature you can Sync an entity between two models. One model will be the source, and the other one Target. You can create the entity in target model if it is not exists, or you can sync it with existing entity.

For choosing Entity Sync, go to System Administration, and then Under Manage menu choose Entity Sync

Then you can Add an entity sync operation. You have to set Source (Model, Version, and Entity), and Target (Model, Version, and entity if exists). You can choose to create new entity or sync with an existing entity.

There are two methods of sync; Sync on Demand (showed in image above), and auto sync (image below).

Auto sync will schedule a sync operation (you can specify number of days/hours to schedule), while On demand will only sync with pressing the Execute button in Entity Sync window for the Sync operation

This feature will help to have better control of data management.

SCD Type 2 Support

If you come from Data Warehousing world, then you are familiar with SCD Type 2 terminology. If you don’t know what is SCD; SCD Stands for Slowly Changing Dimension, and it is actually the behavior that our data structure takes to deal with value changes in attributes of a dimension. SCD Type 2 means the previous value of the attribute will be recorded with start date and end date. SCD has many types and detailed description of that won’t fit in this post. I’ll refer you to this great Wikipedia page about SCD.

Read the rest of blog post here:

https://www.radacad.com/mds-2016-whats-new-in-ctp-2-2