What Creates The Need For Data Quality Monitoring?
Posted on: 15 September 2022
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Many people when they first encounter data quality monitoring issues wonder where these problems come from. Data monitoring is important because several things can corrupt data to the point it either is useless or troublesome.
These four problems are the most common ones that drive the need for data quality monitoring software.
Security
Security issues occur at both the input and output stages of the process. Input problems commonly come from what are called injection attacks. For example, SQL databases are vulnerable to the execution of code when people enter specific characters into forms on websites and apps. The security-side solution for this is to either exclude those characters or convert them into innocuous entities.
Unfortunately, this creates a problem when you ask the database for output. The intent of the substituted characters can end up being preserved, leading to mangled inputs. When you go to use the data, your system might not treat it as you expected. Data monitoring software can check for the most common security patterns in inputs and clean them up for analysis.
User Error
People make mistakes, and other humans usually can easily recognize the mistakes and correct them. Conversely, machines need pattern recognition systems to clean up inputs. You will note that a lot of data quality monitoring boils down to noticing and fixing patterns. For example, a person who uploaded an Excel spreadsheet might have added a bunch of duplicate entries because they forgot some of the stuff they entered at the beginning by the time they got to the end. Fortunately, data monitoring software can scan for duplicates and delete them.
Formatting
Not all systems use the same formatting. Oftentimes, these differences are small. A researcher in the U.S. might enter a date as MM-DD-YYYY while one in Europe may enter it as DD-MM-YYYY. However, you need a data monitoring system in the middle that can detect when the format goes one way or the other. You can either manually instruct the system to favor a specific format or ask it to determine which pattern is the most common.
Data Corruption
Tries as people might, they haven't yet created a data storage method that doesn't eventually have corruption issues. Corruption occurs for numerous reasons, including blackouts, electrical surges, and simultaneous writes. If a system lasts long enough, it will suffer file corruption from some outlandish things such as bombardment by solar particles. Recognizing and correcting corruption are critical parts of data quality monitoring.