Building a Knowledge Base

Applies to: SQL Server

Important

Data Quality Services (DQS) is removed in SQL Server 2025 (17.x). We continue to support DQS in SQL Server 2022 (16.x) and earlier versions.

A knowledge base in Data Quality Services (DQS) is a repository of knowledge about your data that enables you to understand your data and maintain its integrity. A knowledge base consists of domains, each of which represents the data in a data field. The knowledge base is used by DQS to perform data cleansing and deduplication on a database. To prepare the knowledge base for data cleansing, you can run a computer-assisted analysis of a data sample, and interactively manage values in the domains. DQS enables you to import knowledge, create rules and relationships, change data values directly, and leverage a default database.

In This Section

You can perform the following operations on a knowledge base:

Operation Description	Topic
Create a new knowledge base from scratch, from an existing knowledge base, or from a .dqs data file.	Create a Knowledge Base
Open an existing knowledge base to perform knowledge discovery, domain management, or add a matching policy.	Open a Knowledge Base
Perform management actions on a knowledge base, including opening it, unlocking it, discarding your work on it, renaming it, deleting it, or viewing its properties.	Manage a Knowledge Base
Add knowledge to a knowledge base through knowledge discovery; domain value management; adding a matching policy; importing a knowledge, domain, or values; or using the default knowledge base, DQS Data.	Adding Knowledge to a Knowledge Base
Analyze a data sample for data quality criteria.	Perform Knowledge Discovery

Related Tasks

Task Description	Topic
Importing knowledge into, or exporting it from, a knowledge base.	Importing and Exporting Knowledge
Creating a single domain, and adding knowledge to the domain.	Managing a Domain
Creating a composite domain, and adding knowledge to the domain.	Managing a Composite Domain