Boosting Data Accuracy: Resolving Common Data Quality Issues Using SQL

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Boosting Data Accuracy: Resolving Common Data Quality Issues Using SQL

  • Helpful tip re Collation - thanks!

    Leaving the employee as NULL is often operationally identical to 'Unknown'. In the market that I usually serve, users tend to enter 'unknown' (variously misspelled) , 'tba', 'tbc' in all manner of nullable fields, when leaving empty (null) would state the same.

    Thoughts?

  • From a data readability and governance perspective, enforcing values in place of NULL improves efficiency - again  based on downstream reporting needs. This would avoids unnecessary string comparisons and simplifies downstream processing. However, if the distinction between 'intentionally unspecified' vs. 'truly unknown' matters for business logic, then having a standardized placeholder like 'UNKNOWN' might be justifiable—though it should be system-enforced rather than user-driven to prevent inconsistencies.

    A better approach is to implement data validation at the UI level, guiding users to either leave the field empty (NULL) or select a structured option from a predefined list (e.g., 'Not Assigned' vs. 'TBD'). This ensures clean, structured data while maintaining operational clarity. These are based on my experiences as we have seen that in few applications NULL is not handled well leading to errors

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