Handling master data is more about your personal choice and system-specific requirements. If you see that the master data is not going to change for ages and occupies an insignificant amount of records, you are better off with the configuration files or even code enumerations.
This requires someone to push out the configuration files once in a while when the changes do happen. However, this still leaves gap for future. As the rest of the system would depend on this one module, it will be responsible for these updates. If this module does not behave correctly, other parts of the system relying on it could also be impacted negatively.
Another option could be to wrap up master data in a separate service altogether. Having the master ...
