Data Cleansing vs Data Maintenance: Which One Is Most Important?

There are always two aspects to data quality improvement. Data cleansing is the one-off process of tackling the errors within the database, ensuring retrospective anomalies are automatically located and removed. Another term, data maintenance, describes ongoing correction and verification - the process of continual improvement and regular checks.

Often, businesses ask us: which process is the most important? In the long term, which one should we focus on? Unfortunately there is no simple answer, but there is an easy way to understand the differences between them.

An Apple A Day...

When we think about data, we can compare it to caring for our health. In particular, data maintenance is a lot like brushing your teeth. We brush our teeth at least twice a day to stop decay from taking hold. If we didn't, the sugar that we consume would gnaw away at the enamel and cause rot to set in.

The longer we leave it between brushings, the more vulnerable our teeth become. Similarly, our database must be continually cared for and maintained.

Why?

Data in a database rots and decays in exactly the same way as teeth do. Frequent data maintenance is required to keep the data in good health, ensuring that the rot cannot progress to a catastrophic stage. That's one good argument for data maintenance, and it proves why it is an unavoidable task that all businesses must commit to.

But what about cleansing data?

Facing Facts

Simply brushing your teeth helps to stop them from crumbling and decaying, but we also need to organise frequent visits ...