External Reference Data is Reference Data that is maintained by an authority outside the enterprise. The ISO 3166-1 Country standard and the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) are examples of this. However, there are two major ways in which External Reference Data standards are updated. One way is that the standard changes is …
Deltas versus Point Releases in Reference Data Standards Read More »
When the entire contents of reference data tables are displayed, e.g. in dropdowns or reports, the sort order in which the records appear needs to be attended to. There are a number of design considerations that should be evaluated in order to determine the best design solution for a particular situation. In a dropdown list …
Sometimes there can be hierarchies in reference data tables. One example is the US State Department Travel Advisories web page. The Travel Advisories table has a 1 to 4 scale of Travel Advisory Levels, where 1 is the least severe and 4 is the most severe. This is an example of hierarchy in reference data …
Many professionals, both on the pure IT side and on the data side, have tried to reduce the pesky complexity of reference data tables by physically combining them. This typically produces two tables: one with a primary key of the table name, and another with the primary key of table name plus code value. The …
As we all know there is sometimes a need to pay for subscriptions to external reference data authorities. Ideally, all touchpoints with external reference data, including subscriptions, will be the accountability of a central Reference Data Management (RDM) Unit. However, we are still at an immature stage of data management in general in most enterprises, …
Sometimes we see updates to reference data where a code is actually changed. Why would you do this if the description remains unchanged, or even if the description changes? There are actually several reasons. My first experience of this was political, when I was working at the United Nations. One country did not like its …
Normally, we think of changes to reference data as something that is provided and which the Reference Data Management (RDM) function of the enterprise simply pushes into the relevant databases. However, this is not always so. In some cases reference data changes have to be planned, rather than the changes simply applied. This is something …
Reference data is often thought of as being slow to change, and in fact is sometimes called “static”. Of course, in the aggregate, reference data changes frequently. When we think of this, it is usually the reference data codes and descriptions that are the object of focus. Yet, the name of the reference data table …