Master Data (Referenced or Stammdaten)

Master data is handled by Master Data Management. Typical master data are tables such as customer, product, address — things that should be managed centrally and updated once for all systems.

The opposite would be Transactional Data. Master data is, by its nature, almost always non-transactional. Edge cases exist where an organization may need to treat certain transactional processes as “master data” — for example, where information about master data entities like customers or products is only contained within transactional data such as orders and receipts, and is not housed separately.

Master data is typically modeled in a Dimensional Model as a Dimension.

In informatics, a golden record is the single valid version of a data element (record) within a single source of truth system. It may refer to a database, a specific table data field, or any unit of information used.

A golden copy is a consolidated dataset meant to provide a single source of truth — a “well-defined version of all the data entities in an organizational ecosystem”. Other names include master source or master version.

More on Golden record (informatics) - Wikipedia.

• Customer, product, address
• Reference data, hierarchies, classifications

An alternative definition of master data is that it represents the business objects containing the most valuable, agreed-upon information shared across an organization.

In this sense, it gives context to business activities and transactions — answering questions like who, what, when, and how — while expanding the ability to make sense of these activities through categorizations, groupings, and hierarchies. It can cover relatively static reference data, transactional, unstructured, analytical, hierarchical, and metadata. In German, this is called “Stammdaten”.

What constitutes master data under this definition is therefore not about an essential quality of the data itself, but rather about the context in which an organization has decided to treat it.

Origin: Master Data Management