Overview

In dynamic data environments where information changes rapidly—such as stock prices, customer statuses, or last-login dates—the origin of the data is often less important than its freshness.

The Recency strategy is a time-based survivorship rule that ensures your Golden Record always reflects the most current state of reality.

Instead of prioritizing specific systems, this logic evaluates the timestamps of conflicting records and selects the value that was updated last.

The Logic: Time-Based Selection

When the Recency strategy is applied, the UnifyApps platform compares the Modified Time or Last Updated metadata across all duplicate records found in the match group.

The Winner: The value associated with the latest (most recent) timestamp wins.

The Losers: Older values, even if they come from high-priority systems, are discarded in favor of the newer data point.

Configuration Options

You can implement Recency in two primary ways within the Survivorship dashboard:

1. Global Default
   You can set Recency as the Default Survivorship Strategy for the entire Entity.
   This is a common configuration for fast-moving operational entities where keeping data up-to-date is the primary goal for every field.

2. Field-Level Customization
   Alternatively, you can apply Recency only to specific volatile fields using Custom Strategy settings.
   For example, you might use Source System logic for stable fields like Date of Birth (trusting HR), while applying Recency logic to the Current Address field to capture the latest move, regardless of which system reported it first.