Master Data management
When we refer to Master Data, we are talking about the descriptive data that is at the core of an organization and the processes to ensure that we can understand when different units are referring to the same instance of a concept.
To many extents, Master Data in the data platform realm overlaps with the dimensions that describe the organization concepts, such as customer, product, employee, and so on.
The rare times when we have a Master Data dimension, it adds the semantic of containing the “golden records” selected to represent the instances of the business concept (that is, the entity) represented by the dimension.
As an example, the product MD dimension (MDD_PRODUCT
for us in the REF layer) contains the golden records of the products, starting from the codes used as the PK of the entity and continuing with the values of the columns.
Quite often, we will have only a list of MD codes, eventually with names, and mapping tables that...