What is master data management (MDM)?
Master data management (MDM) is the discipline of creating and maintaining a single, consistent, authoritative version of core business entities, customers, products, suppliers, across all systems. It resolves duplicates and conflicting records so everyone works from the same trusted master data.
Most organisations hold the same entities in many systems: a customer in the CRM, the billing system and the support tool, often with slightly different details. MDM builds a 'golden record', one agreed, deduplicated, reconciled version of each entity that other systems reference.
MDM typically involves:
- Matching and deduplication identifying records that describe the same entity.
- Survivorship rules deciding which value wins when records conflict.
- A master reference that downstream systems align to.
- Governance ownership and stewardship of the master data.
It is a significant, ongoing programme, and one many organisations only partly complete.
iDBQuery does not replace an MDM programme, but it eases a pain MDM addresses: reconciling entities across systems to answer a question. Its federation engine can join records from different sources in a single query, and its semantic layer helps recognise when differently named fields mean the same thing. So even before a golden record exists, you can ask a question that spans several systems and iDBQuery will connect the data, returning a cited answer, and it can help you spot the duplicate or conflicting records that MDM is meant to resolve.
Updated 2026-06-22