Master Data Management “The Golden Record”

The Golden Record is a fundamental concept within Master Data Management (MDM) that identifies and defines the single version of truth, where truth is understood to be data that is trusted to both accurate and correct. When building database tables from disparate data sources, there commonly are issues of duplication of records, incomplete values within a record, and records with poor data quality. The golden record solves these issues by correcting duplications, by providing values when a value may not exist, and by improving data quality within a record. Moreover, the Golden Record is a record that an organization assumes to best possible record to be utilized.

The main consideration in the creation and maintenance of the Golden Record is the matching and merging of records that were created in different data sources. A good MDM system will include functionality to automatically merge similar records as much as possible. Additionally a good MDM system will provide functionality to allow a data steward to manually determine the best possible record. The data steward should be able to use their knowledge of a particular data set to make a judgement related to the correct values in a record. And the data steward should be able to identify whether an attribute or an entire records is correct.

When similar records from different systems have different values, one of the records has be chosen as the one that is correct. In order to determine the correct record, either the system or the data steward will need to consider the user of each each data set, the level of quality in each data set, the attribute of each data set that are the most reliable, and the rules for determining priority for each field. In the example above, each of three systems contain a record that is similar to a record contained in the other two systems. But the values in each attribute of the three similar records are not exactly the same. The Golden Record could be determined to be an entire record from one of the source systems or a combination of attributes from the records in the source systems.

In this case, the Golden Record contains a combination of values for the multiple source systems. The value for the name field is taken from source system three, while all of the values of the other attributes are taken from source system one.