What's in a name?
Learn about some terms you’ll encounter regularly.
Understanding these terms gives you a foundation for learning about the Reltio solution and the technologies we use.
What’s a multidomain MDM? Is it different from a multiple domain MDM?
- Multidomain, also sometimes spelled multi-domain – These MDM systems support
multi-domains within the same software platform. Reltio Data Cloud is built on multi-domain technologies. You'll want a multi-domain
system if you:
- Have data streams from multiple data domains, for example, customer, supplier, and product.
- Want to take advantage of the power of all that combined data.
- Multiple domain – These MDM systems handle only a single data domain, for example, a customer, supplier, or product domain. For such cases, some MDM providers offer separate software products for handling different domains. If your company collects and accumulates data for only a single data domain, a multiple domain MDM product may work for you. You just pick the one appropriate for your type of data.
What’s the Reltio layered model?
What’s with the layers? Is this an onion?
The Reltio layered model uses the layers as building blocks that enable you to add increasingly customized layers to your configuration of various solutions (capabilities or layers of customizations). You start with a preconfigured default base layer, then a layer of industry-specific customizations, then a layer you can configure as appropriate for your company.
What’s data modeling?
Data modeling starts with a diagram of how data flows into and out of the database. Then you revise the diagram as you change it.
What’s a data entity?
You'll commonly hear the term entity in conversations about database and MDM technologies. Just so you know, in our Reltio solutions and documentation, when we say entity, we mean some type of data entity. A data entity is an object in a data model. Data is typically designed by breaking things down into their smallest parts that are useful for representing data relationships. For example, a customer may include a list of contacts and each contact may contain an address. We consider all three objects: customer, contact, and address to be data entities.
For details about entity types, see the topic Reltio entity types.
What database management system (DBMS) technology is Reltio built on?
Object-oriented, but consider this…
Early in MDM technology development, solutions were commonly built on relational database management system (RDBMS) technologies. At Reltio, we've built our solutions (or, our MDM platform) using a modern NoSQL object-oriented database management system (OODBMS).
RDBMS vs OODBM
- RDBMS -- DBMS based on the relational model, which means the data and relationships are represented by a collection of inter-related tables.
- OODBMS (or ODBMS) -- A newer DBMS model that's object-oriented and consistent with current object-oriented programming languages. Object-oriented means the data is represented in the form of objects. They provide key-based access to semi-structured data as documents, typically using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).
What are facets in Reltio?
Facets are like options that relate to the underlying entities, relationships, and other objects definitions.