MDM design patterns

MDM has been a requirement for many decades now. Enterprise systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), human resources management (HRM), and others have been around for many decades now. Invariably, these systems are set up by different software vendors, and some of them can be homegrown. Managing the master data between these systems has been a requirement for a long time now. As a result, a few industry patterns have emerged on how master data are managed. Multiple articles and papers will discuss different patterns; here, I am summing it all up into three high-level methods of managing your master data:

• Registry-based system: This is the traditional method where the actual master data are maintained inside the individual systems, but the data are registered with a reference in a central database. The records across the systems are matched, and duplicates are recognized and...