jay holovacs (5/10/2011)
It falls into the 'right tool for the right job'Financials, order entry, etc need to be exact. By comparison many of the largist data set operations (such as business/trend analysis) can easily afford to loose a small amount of data (often the noise in the original data can be larger than such data loss).
If you use a highly structured data system for non rigid data, you probably are using too many resources.
I think your point about noise is a key consideration. None of the people entering or interpreting the data are perfect and incorrect data is often more damaging than missing data.