--- title: "Master data management (MDM)" summary: "Master data management is the organisational discipline and the platform category that maintains authoritative shared records for core business objects such as customers, suppliers and products." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/master-data-management last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # Master data management (MDM) > Master data management is the organisational discipline and the platform category that maintains authoritative shared records for core business objects such as customers, suppliers and products. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/master-data-management Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Foundations ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under foundations](https://entitybind.com/glossary#foundations). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What master data management (MDM) means Master data management is the work of keeping one agreed version of the business objects several systems share — customers, suppliers, products — and also the name of the platform category sold to do it. It is broader than entity resolution and contains it. A programme covers governance (who owns a definition, who may change it), stewardship (who resolves the exceptions), modelling (what a customer is, in this company), workflow (how a change is approved), distribution (which systems get the master and how) and matching (which records are the same thing). Matching is one component, and it is the one most often bought rather than built. The platform category — the products sold as MDM — usually bundles a matching engine, a stewardship interface, a workflow engine and a hub that other systems subscribe to. The hub is the part that makes MDM strategic and also the part that makes it slow: becoming the system of record for customer data means every consuming system has to change, which is why so many programmes stall in their second year with the matching working and the distribution unbuilt. The distinction worth holding onto is between the system of record and the decision layer. An MDM hub asserts what is true and distributes it. A decision layer answers whether two things are the same, with evidence, and hands the answer back. Entity Bind is the second of those and not the first. It is not an MDM platform, holds no stewardship workflow for your business objects, and does not become your system of record. It sits beside the hub, tests the matches the hub proposes, contradicts them with a citation where it disagrees, and abstains where the evidence does not carry a decision. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [Survivorship and golden records](https://entitybind.com/guides/survivorship-and-golden-records): Once records have been joined to an entity, something has to decide what the entity's address, name and phone number actually are, because the joined records disagree. - [Master data management](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/master-data-management): Golden records, deciding which value wins when two records merge, and what a durable entity id has to outlive. - [Compared with MDM platforms](https://entitybind.com/compare/informatica-and-reltio): Where a matching decision ends and a master data platform begins. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/glossary/reference-data): Reference data is the slow-changing, externally defined data used to classify and identify things — registers, code lists, identifier schemes — as opposed to the transactional data that refers to it. - [Golden record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/golden-record): A golden record is the single assembled view of an entity built by choosing one value per field from the records attached to it, ideally with the provenance of each choice carried alongside it. - [Survivorship](https://entitybind.com/glossary/survivorship): Survivorship is the set of rules that picks which value wins, field by field, when the records in a cluster disagree. - [Entity resolution](https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity-resolution): Entity resolution is the process of deciding which records, across one or many datasets, refer to the same real-world thing — and, when the evidence does not settle it, deciding that too. - [Review queue](https://entitybind.com/glossary/review-queue): A review queue is where records the system refused to decide are held for a human, and the quality of a resolver is largely determined by how small, how well-evidenced and how accountable that queue is. - [Deduplication](https://entitybind.com/glossary/deduplication): Deduplication is entity resolution applied within a single dataset: finding the rows that are the same thing and deciding which of them may safely be collapsed. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [Tamr](https://entitybind.com/compare/tamr) (Comparison): Machine-learning mastering at enterprise scale. It learns your labels — including the wrong ones. - [Entity resolution vs record linkage: which term is right](https://entitybind.com/guides/entity-resolution-vs-record-linkage) (Guide): Record linkage, entity resolution, deduplication, entity matching, entity linking and identity resolution name overlapping problems from different fields. What each term means and when each one is correct. ## The other 9 terms on this shelf What the problem is called, and what the objects in it are. Entity, record, cluster, and the four industry names for the same job. - [Entity resolution](https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity-resolution) - [Record linkage](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record-linkage) - [Deduplication](https://entitybind.com/glossary/deduplication) - [Entity](https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity) - [Record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record) - [Cluster](https://entitybind.com/glossary/cluster) - [Golden record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/golden-record) - [Survivorship](https://entitybind.com/glossary/survivorship) - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/glossary/reference-data) Previous, alphabetically: [m-probability](https://entitybind.com/glossary/m-probability) · Next, alphabetically: [Match weight](https://entitybind.com/glossary/match-weight) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/master-data-management, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.