Many BI efforts--especially enterprise BI--go awry at one critical point--the management of master data. And yet most SQL Server shops are flying blind because historically Microsoft has offered nothing to help manage master data.

What is master data? Any data that's truly important to your business that's usually stored in more than one place: that's my over-simplified way to identify master data. For example, customer data is usually important: A customer relationship management (CRM) syst...