MDM Implementation Styles

In any MDM deployment, one of the important decisions to be made is the choice of the MDM architecture. Gartner and other analysts describe some different Hub deployment styles, which must be supported by a best of breed MDM solution in order to guarantee the success of the deployment project

MDM has three main Implementation Styles

Registry Style

In a Registry Style hub, the various source systems publish their customer data and the subscribing hub stores only the source system IDs, the Foreign Keys (record IDs) and the key data values (needed for matching). The hub runs the cleansing & matching algorithms and assigns unique global identifiers to the matched records, but it does not send any data back to the source systems.The Registry Style MDM Hub uses data federation capabilities to build the "virtual" golden view of the master entity from the connected systems.


Transaction Style

In this architecture, the Hub stores, enhances and maintains all the relevant (master) data attributes. It becomes the authoritative source of truth and publishes this valuable information back to the respective source systems. The Hub publishes and writes back the various data elements to the source systems after the linking, cleansing, matching and enriching algorithms have done their work. Upstream, transactional applications can read master data from the MDM Hub, and, potentially, all spoke systems subscribe to updates published from the central system in a form of harmonization. The Hub needs to support merging of master records. Security and visibility policies at the data attribute level need to be supported by the Transaction Style hub, as well.

Hybrid Style

This style resembles the Registry Style but stores more data elements / attributes than just those required for matching. Sometimes to enable a larger set of data elements, ETL tools may need to be integrated with the Hybrid Hub solution. The Hybrid Style addresses the performance issues mentioned above which are often faced by Registry Style hubs.

One can use some collaboration tools like workflows / Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to accept the recommended changes by the Hub into the source systems and that has been a useful approach implemented at some companies.

Hybrid Style hubs can be implemented relatively quickly, because the data in the source systems still usually does not get changed, and integration requirements are less than the full Transaction Style.