There were lots of good improvements and new features in MDS 2012 version but during our current project I found out some interesting things about collections.  According to Microsoft they do have made improvements to the collections GUI (which was crap indeed in MDS 2008R2) but for some reason they didn’t improve the collections importing via staging tables along with the release of the completely new staging process.

I was searching for collection-specific staging tables and confusingly found none. Then I made some findings in the following article: Discontinued Master Data Services Features in SQL Server 2012. There it’s clearly said that:

You cannot use the new staging process to:

• Create or delete collections.
• Add members to or remove members from collections.
• Reactivate members and collections.

You can use the SQL Server 2008 R2 staging process to work with collections.

So it seems like they ran out of time creating new staging process for collections in product development and decided to continue supporting collections import in “2008R2 way”. I bet this will be deprecated in the next version and hopefully they’ll invent a new staging process for collections in the next SQL Server version. Until then I’ll stick up using the old staging tables and good old mdm.udpStagingSweep stored procedure 🙂