The MDM Problem Every Data Leader Recognizes

Ask any CDO what keeps them up at night and master data is usually on the list. Not because the technology doesn't exist — but because the technology they bought years ago has become the problem.

Your CRM says you have 80,000 customers. Your ERP says 120,000. Your analytics team is working from a third number entirely. Nobody trusts the data, so nobody acts on it confidently.

That's not an analytics problem. That's a master data problem — and it compounds every year you leave it unsolved.

The traditional answer was to buy another platform and pipe data into it. Clean it there. Pipe it back. Pay for sync jobs to keep everything aligned. Hope nothing breaks in transit.

Databricks Lakebase makes that entire architecture obsolete.

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Trusted Golden Records — Without Leaving the Lakehouse

With LakeFusion MDM — implemented by Frisco Analytics — master data lives where the rest of your data already lives: inside Databricks. Delta Lake holds the source of truth. Lakebase serves trusted golden records in real time, as Postgres tables, with sub-5ms lookups. Unity Catalog governs every access, every lineage trace, every audit trail — end to end.

No data movement. No external MDM platform to maintain. No synchronization gaps where bad data sneaks back in.

Your golden records are always current. Always governed. Always queryable by any application or user in plain SQL.

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What Customers Are Building

Customer 360 — manufacturing, retail, financial services

A global manufacturer running customer data across four ERPs and two CRMs had the same company appearing under 14 different names and IDs. Sales couldn't identify active accounts. Finance couldn't consolidate receivables.

LakeFusion MDM's match engine and survivorship rules — running natively on Delta Lake — collapsed those records into a single golden customer. Any downstream application now queries Lakebase directly. Sub-5ms. No sync job. No data movement.

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Supplier MDM — supply chain and procurement

Without a trusted supplier record you can't manage vendor risk, consolidate spend, or meet ESG reporting requirements. LakeFusion MDM brings supplier records together from procurement systems, vendor portals, and ERP modules — resolving duplicates with LLM-powered entity matching and keeping the golden record live and governed across every system that needs it.

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Patient 360 — healthcare and life sciences

Patient identity is a patient safety issue. When the same patient has multiple records across hospital systems, EHRs, and billing platforms, care gets fragmented and errors happen.

LakeFusion MDM creates a unified patient identity — probabilistic matching across source systems, configurable survivorship rules, and golden records available at the sub-second performance clinical applications demand.

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The Architecture Under the Hood

Delta Lake — Source of Truth All landing data, staging, match results, and survivorship history live in Delta Lake — CDF-enabled for change data capture, Liquid Clustered for query performance at scale.

Lakebase — Real-Time Serving Layer Golden records, cross-references, and match candidates are served as Postgres tables with a three-layer cache (shared_buffers · golden_record · xref_cache) and sub-5ms lookups. Repeat queries are near-instant.

LLM Match Agents on Serverless SQL Warehouse Entity resolution, probabilistic matching, attribute standardization, and reference mapping run as LLM-powered agents on Databricks Serverless — no external ML infrastructure required.

Unity Catalog — Governance End to End Access controls, data lineage, audit logs, and stewardship workflows are all Unity Catalog-native. No separate governance layer to manage.
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Zero data egress. The entire MDM lifecycle — ingest, match, resolve, serve — runs inside Databricks.

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Migrating Off Legacy MDM  — MetaConvert

The biggest reason enterprises stay on legacy MDMs isn't loyalty. It's the fear of what migration involves.

Years of business rules. Thousands of match configurations. Custom survivorship logic built by people who left the company. Rebuilding all of that by hand takes 6–9 months and most migrations stall halfway through.

MetaConvert is Frisco Analytics' accelerator that automates this entirely:

1. Extract — Reads all metadata, rules, and mappings from your existing legacy MDM environment
2. Translate — Converts match rules, survivorship logic, and reference data into LakeFusion-compatible configurations
3. Generate — Produces production-ready Databricks pipelines and code artifacts
4. Validate — Side-by-side quality checks between legacy outputs and new golden records before go-live

The result is a migration your team can actually complete — with full confidence in what was carried over and clarity on what was improved.

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Getting Started

Every engagement starts with a half-day discovery workshop. We map your current MDM landscape, identify the domains with the highest business impact, assess your legacy platform's migration complexity, and scope a clear path to production on Databricks.

Most teams leave that workshop with a sharper picture of their master data than they've had in years.
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Frisco Analytics is a certified LakeFusion SI partner and Databricks Brickbuilder partner, exclusively focused on MDM on the Databricks Lakehouse.

Contact: contact@friscoanalytics.com

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