The Data Quality Server and Client in older SQL Server releases supported data profiling, domain knowledge, cleansing and matching projects. This article preserves the concept while clarifying discontinued support.
Concept and purpose
A knowledge base stored domain rules and relationships; the client helped users discover values, validate knowledge, clean data and manually review corrections. Different editions and versions had different feature prerequisites.
Example or practical exercise
For a controlled test, create a staging customer dataset with missing postal codes, duplicated records and inconsistent abbreviations. Evaluate rules and review results before updating a business table.
Good practices
Back up source data, keep a record of every correction, set confidence thresholds carefully, and avoid automatically merging records based solely on text similarity.
Version and compatibility notes
Data Quality Services is removed in SQL Server 2025. Use supported earlier-version instructions only for maintenance of existing systems; use maintained data-quality pipelines for new development.
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