SQL Sever 2012 Data Quality Services – Using External Reference Data

In this short video, I show how to locate, try out and use external data services (in this case Digital Trowel from the Windows Azure Data Market) in DQS.  In my example screencast, I show the use of Digital Trowel’s Powerlinx service, which is

“…the largest and most comprehensive database of U.S. public and private companies, and business professionals, with tens of millions of in-depth and cross-referenced profiles. Powerlinx contains contact information of more than 10 million USA companies with website addresses, 25M detailed company profiles, 25M executives including 5 million in-depth profiles with email addresses and phone numbers.  Our proprietary algorithms, identifies duplications and recognizes spelling variations, synonyms and antonyms. Once a data segment is fully standardized, matched and merged, the system can append data to any missing fields.
Our USA Business Contact Information with Website Addresses dataset provides the following information: DT Company ID, Company Name, Address, Phone, Contact Name & Title, URL, SIC Code, Sales and Number of Employees.  Powerlinx is unmatched in completeness, accuracy and timeliness of data, which is created by automatically and continuously extracting the latest data collected from the web, corroborating data from multiple sites, and eliminating duplications.”

After you sign up for the service, I show you how to configure DQS to use this reference data to improve the quality of a particular domain in your KB.  Do be aware, as I mention in this video, that although you can try this service out for free, there can be costs associated with using it, depending on the number of records per month that you submit to the service to verify.