A Golden Record is the merged best version of an entity (person or company) assembled from multiple sources. Sources contribute fields; conflicts resolve by source-quality and recency; the result is one canonical record with full provenance.
The merge process
When a new source contributes data about an entity, Golden DB runs three steps:
- Identity resolution — is this the same entity we already have?
- Field-level merge — which value wins per field?
- Provenance recording — log the source and timestamp per field.
Conflict resolution rules
When two sources disagree on a field, the conflict resolves by source-quality score plus recency. Each source has a configured quality score per field (e.g. Provider A is high-quality for email, low for phone; Provider B is the opposite). The higher-quality source wins; ties break by recency.
What's in a Golden Record
- Core fields — name, email, phone, title, employer (for people) or domain, industry, size (for companies).
- Enriched fields — technographics, intent signals, funding stage, hiring data.
- Behavioral data — engagement history, last activity, response patterns.
- Provenance — per-field source, timestamp, confidence.
- Activity log — full history of touches and changes.
How Golden Records update
Continuously, as new data arrives. When a source pushes an updated value, Golden DB re-runs the merge for that field — keeping the highest-quality, most-recent value. The record's audit trail shows every change with source and time.
