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Netflix PDM (Primary Data Management)

PDM — Primary Data Management — is Netflix's platform for managing authoritative reference data and taxonomies, and is the first named production consumer of UDA (Source: sources/2025-06-14-netflix-model-once-represent-everywhere-uda).

What PDM does

From the Netflix post: "PDM is our platform for managing authoritative reference data and taxonomies. PDM turns domain models into flat or hierarchical taxonomies that drive a generated UI for business users. These taxonomy models are projected into Avro and GraphQL schemas, automatically provisioning data products in the Warehouse and GraphQL APIs in the Enterprise Gateway."

Concretely:

  1. A Netflix team authors a domain model in Upper (systems/netflix-upper) — e.g. a taxonomy of genres, a catalog of territories, a classification of asset types.
  2. PDM turns that model into a flat or hierarchical taxonomy with a generated UI for business users to manage entries.
  3. The same model is projected — via UDA's transpiler family (patterns/schema-transpilation-from-domain-model) — into:
  4. Avro schemas, auto-provisioning data products in the Netflix Warehouse.
  5. GraphQL schemas, auto-provisioning APIs on the Enterprise GraphQL Gateway.

One authored model → one UI + one warehouse data product + one Enterprise-Gateway API. This is the model-once-represent-everywhere thesis applied to reference data.

Why PDM fits the UDA thesis

Reference data + taxonomies are the archetype of "same concept, modelled differently everywhere" — every team historically rebuilt their own genre list, territory list, rating-system table, each in whatever schema best fit their stack. PDM uses UDA's model-as-data substrate to collapse all of that into:

  • One source of truth for the taxonomy entries (as data in the knowledge graph).
  • One source of truth for the taxonomy shape (as a domain model in Upper).
  • Many generated surfaces — authoring UI + Avro + GraphQL + anything else UDA can transpile to later.

Canonical master-data-management instance

PDM is the wiki's canonical instance of UDA-driven master data management — taxonomies and reference data as first-class UDA domain models with auto-provisioned storage and API surfaces.

Caveats

  • Internal-to-Netflix. No fleet / QPS / taxonomy-count / entry-count numbers disclosed.
  • Authoring UI details undisclosed. The generation of the UI from the domain model is mentioned, not specified.
  • Avro / GraphQL provisioning pipeline opaque. End-to-end pipeline mentioned, not walked through.
  • Relationship to prior Netflix master-data-management systems (if any) not discussed.

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