Enterprise data. What does that really mean? Much has been written on this subject, but for the sake of this discourse, let's try to define this in discrete terms and usages. At Oracle, we view data in one of three ways: analytical, transactional, and master. Analytical data drives decision-making. Transactional data supports the applications, and master data represents the business objects and points upon which transactions are performed and how analytics are built. We can see this model described in the following figure:
When an organization moves and uses data, it is transformed, changed, and stored in different ways. Incidentally, this introduces some ideas around ILM such as active and passive data archiving, but we are jumping ahead a bit. The description of the data and its characteristics represent a fourth conceptual type of data, called metadata. This will become important as we look at MDM strategies in the coming section. Before we move on to MDM, let...