Book Image

Practical Data Quality

By : Robert Hawker
Book Image

Practical Data Quality

By: Robert Hawker

Overview of this book

Poor data quality can lead to increased costs, hinder revenue growth, compromise decision-making, and introduce risk into organizations. This leads to employees, customers, and suppliers finding every interaction with the organization frustrating. Practical Data Quality provides a comprehensive view of managing data quality within your organization, covering everything from business cases through to embedding improvements that you make to the organization permanently. Each chapter explains a key element of data quality management, from linking strategy and data together to profiling and designing business rules which reveal bad data. The book outlines a suite of tried-and-tested reports that highlight bad data and allow you to develop a plan to make corrections. Throughout the book, you’ll work with real-world examples and utilize re-usable templates to accelerate your initiatives. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a clear understanding of every stage of a data quality initiative and be able to drive tangible results for your organization at pace.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Getting Started
6
Part 2 – Understanding and Monitoring the Data That Matters
10
Part 3 – Improving Data Quality for the Long Term

An introduction to data quality rules

A data quality rule is logic that is applied to each row of a dataset, which can determine whether the row of data is correct or incorrect. Correct data is deemed to have passed the rule, and incorrect data is deemed to have failed the rule – hence, the term failed data, which is used heavily in Chapter 7.

Data quality rules always give a Boolean output – in other words, a row of data always passes or fails.

The following table provides a few (purposefully very simple) examples:

Business logic

Passed row example

Failed row example

The VAT number must be complete for all suppliers.

Any row with any character in this field would pass.

Any row which is “null” or “blank” would fail.

The VAT number...