Parijat@SUN: Work hard but think smart

Master Data is the business context data of entities or objects involved in business transaction. MDM helps in creating complete, consolidated views of information. It also helps in customer data integration and product information management. Some of the entity domains where MDM is largely used are:
- Person (Customer, Patient, Subscriber, Citizen, Employee)
- Business (Client, Vendor, Supplier)
- Products (Parts, Products)

Let's take a case study where we need to consolidate customer data. French Bank B is being merged to an American Bank A. The merged banks must find the common or potentially common customers to provide them certain advantages (like free money orders if total deposits exceeds certain total), report them to agencies toom comply with certain government regulations (hiding black money in foreign account). John Green married Mary Davidson when they were in France and they have moved to USA after marriage. They have a daughter Christine. Note that Mary has changed last name after marriage. John has a different address. John and Mary has accounts in Bank B since the time they were in France. They also have account in Bank A now. Christione has account in Bank A. See how the MDM application will identify them:
- John is an assumed match and will be placed in the common customer list.
- Mary is in the same house hold and a potential match list and should be analyzed by bank individuals.
- Christine is in the same house hold.  

• Proliferation of applications with dispersed data across disparate systems
• Increasing need to be customer-aware to deliver the right customer experience
• Just in time business models require agility and integration across the enterprise
• Ongoing mergers and acquisitions
• Compliance requirements
• Localized governmental requirements
• Focus on data governance - data ownership and data quality

SUN Mural: Open Source Master Data Management is the first and unique of its type. It has the following major components.
Master Index Studio – Provides the capability to create any domain-specific master index as we described above.
Data Integrator –Provides extract-transform-load (ETL) and supports a wide variety of data sources
Data Quality – Features matching, standardization, normalization, profiling, and cleansing capabilities
Data Mashup/Services – Provides server-side data mashup capability
Data Migrator – Provides the ability to migrate database objects across database instances