Data engineering·Moving data out of the source
two systems disagree about the customer's address and you need to be able to say, without arguing, which one is allowed to be right.
System of record
Also calledsource of record, authoritative source
The system whose copy of a fact is authoritative, by agreement rather than by accident. Naming it is what stops a data integration turning into a negotiation every time two copies drift. It matters most where data flows both ways: without an agreed system of record, a sync loop will happily overwrite the correct value with the stale one and neither team will be able to prove which happened.