[jorangreef]

I’m not convinced that it’s confusing, or that there’s a better alternative—but I appreciate your critique.

Do you not think if someone can remember those four words, they’re less likely to get it wrong?

If you could contribute some better suggestions we could consider them!

[layer8]

> Do you not think if someone can remember those four words, they’re less likely to get it wrong?

Only if they remember the words in the right order, which isn’t a given. There is nothing in the phrase that helps remembering the order, unless you already know how it has to work. What it probably does at least is remind you that the order matters.

Maybe find something that emphasizes that the master data (the data in the system of record) has the shortest storage duration (since its writes happen last and its reads happen first). Something like “keep central data central in time” (and peripheral data peripheral in time).

As a side note, while I know that “system of record” and “system of reference” are existing terms, they are a bit unfortunate in that they sound very similar, both abbreviating to SOR, and “reference data” having semantic overlap with “master data”, so “system of reference” could be taken to mean the system to be used as the reference, i.e. master data.