Manage the Cardinality of Record Relationships

TIBCO MDM manages all relationships as peer to peer and many-to-many. Therefore, you do not need to define cardinality.

However, it is better to define cardinality in the repository model for documentation. If cardinality has to be enforced, use the rulebase.

If the cardinality is expected to be more than 500, you encounter performance issues. For example, if a Car comprises over 500 parts, you should group the parts (door parts, cabin parts, suspension parts). This reduces the amount of 'crawling' over relationships that TIBCO MDM needs to complete. Larger cardinality results in performance degradation for all channels, especially on the UI.

Use the following strategies to keep cardinality manageable:

  • Create an intermediate group object. For example, if a customer has more than 500 accounts, create an account group object to bunch accounts such that each group has no more than 100 accounts.
  • Configure TIBCO MDM to exclude relationships from parent to child or reverse if the navigation is always in one direction.
  • Define the relationships as a softlink. The relationships between records are explicitly maintained if defined as a softlink, and are not searched as version-specific.