Master Data Management (MDM) and Data Integration or Extract, Transform, Load tools (DI or ETL) are all part of a complete Enterprise Information Management (EIM) architecture. But there’s some level of confusion or disagreement about how exactly they relate to one another. I have heard the sentiment, “We don’t need an MDM, we can do the matching we need in our ETL jobs.” This claim misses the point in some important respects. Let’s consider how these different technologies compare with each other and complement each other.