Technical interview guide

Master Data Management

Maintaining one authoritative version of core business entities — customers, products — across many systems.

Read: 34 min
Practice MCQs: 25
Interview QA: 25
Edition: v4
Editorial status: Reviewed
Relevant for: Data Architect

Scope: IBM InfoSphere and watsonx.data MDM guidance, Microsoft Purview MDM guidance, W3C PROV-O, EU GDPR, and NIST Privacy Framework current 2026-08-31.

Interview QA

Treat each question like a live interview question: answer out loud first (structure, assumptions, tradeoffs), then open the model answer to spot gaps and rehearse a tighter follow-up.

Curated: 2026-10-05 · Written: 2026-09-09 · Reviewed: 2026-10-03

QA-1

Design customer master data management for three source systems.

QA-2

Choose between registry, centralized, and coexistence MDM.

QA-3

Design an entity-resolution pipeline.

QA-4

Evaluate whether a matching model is production-ready.

QA-5

Set automatic match and clerical-review thresholds.

QA-6

Define survivorship for customer attributes.

QA-7

Create a data-stewardship workflow for suspected duplicates.

QA-8

Recover from a false merge that reached downstream systems.

QA-9

Onboard a new source into an existing MDM domain.

QA-10

Design reliable master-data distribution.

QA-11

Assess privacy risk in a customer-360 master.

QA-12

Handle a correction or deletion request in MDM.

QA-13

Design householding without conflating people.

QA-14

Design product master data management.

QA-15

Govern organizational hierarchies in MDM.

QA-16

Integrate master data after an acquisition.

QA-17

Handle reused or recycled source identifiers.

QA-18

Evolve a master entity schema without breaking consumers.

QA-19

Design availability and disaster recovery for MDM.

QA-20

Monitor an MDM service in production.

QA-21

Evaluate an MDM vendor or platform.

QA-22

Migrate consumers from local customer keys to a master ID.

QA-23

Govern shared reference data alongside master data.

QA-24

Change a production matching algorithm safely.

QA-25