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Why Data Stinks

By jeremy - Posted on 28 July 2004

Thanks to a number of issues like Sarbanes-Oxley the quality of data is very important and now can result in put you in jail if you get it very wrong with financial data. Many of the problems associated with bad data are because the people designing the database don't know what they are doing and management won't send them to training. There are many examples of really bad encoding schemes that are shockingly short-sighted and examples of many organizations doing tests against live data.

Here are a few suggestions:

  • doing use an oversized column, having a nvrchar(255) for a zip code field is begining for problems.
  • failure to have a check constraints
  • having a default value is very important
  • use standards, don't recreate work.
  • if you use codes, put the codes in the database.
  • have a data dictionary! readed ISO-11179, it does a lot of work for you.
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