Master Data

Data is really your revenue... Do you treat is as such?

Data strategies - Data mastering in 2008]

Today, we are experiencing a huge battle for the ownership of your enterprise data between huge IT platforms

• Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence platforms
• Enterprise Search platforms
• Service Oriented Architecture/SOA platforms

On top of this, the "new kid on the block" arrives as the much over-hyped MDS platforms..

Definitions

Master data should not contain:

• Parent-child relationships
• Degenerate dimensional information
• Junk
• Data that is unrelated or weakly related to the business key.
• multi-part business keys that represent relationships in the business world.

Master data structures should contain:

• The business key, the whole business key and nothing but the business key.
• In addition to the business key, all descriptive data about the business key (to provide the business key current context)
• 1 to 1 relationship with a surrogate generated number to the business key.
• Load date, create date, last updated date, original record source, updated record source