Regular readers will have followed the excellent series on Data Quality Rules by data quality practitioner, author and trainer Arkady Maydanchik. If you missed it please click here.

In this tutorial we take a closer look at how you can start to discover, measure and monitor some of the data quality rules Arkady covers in his book “Data Quality Assessment” (see here) using standard reporting and analysis tools found in most organisations.

We include a link to a 30 day trial of the excellent Omniscope visualisation tool and a complete set of historical retail data supplied by business analytics specialists Atheon Analytics so you can carry out the tutorial with a real tool and business data.

A Data Quality History Lesson

In Arkady Maydanchik's tutorial on Historical Data Quality Rules we discover some key data quality metrics that companies frequently fail to observe.

Data warehouses are often our most popular source of historical data with information flowing in from satellite systems on a daily or hourly basis and these probably get the most data quality attention but there are many more sources of historical data in even the most modest of organisations.

Payroll systems, revenue accounting databases, product orders, equipment service histories – practically every data source in your organisation will have some form of historical data.

Modern data quality tools aren’t particularly smart at trapping these subtle kind of defects, at least out of the box.

Data quality tools typically operate at the column or multi-column level so they can fail to spot the often subtle and insidious data defects that occur in historical data.

To be blunt, you need to use your eyes, follow a structured approach as taught by Arkady and start to discover, measure, improve and control those data quality rules that really matter to your business.

Tutorial Includes Links to Advanced Data Visualisation Tool

In the following tutorial we take a look at how a simple reporting or visualisation tool, in this case Visokio Omniscope, can be used to discover the occurrence of historical data quality rules, measure their performance and then remain in place for continuous monitoring.

For a detailed account of data quality rules we strongly recommend you or your company gets hold of a copy of "Data Quality Assessment" by Arkady. This is an essential guide for discovering, measuring and enforcing data quality rules in your organisation. You can grab a copy here.

Included in the tutorial is a live sample from an anonymised retail data warehouse courtesy of business analytics specialists Atheon Analytics and you can also download the full featured Omniscope product during the tutorial and use it on your own data for up to 30 days.

This is a great tool to add to your data quality or business intelligence arsenal as it is delivers results in minutes and is very business focused.

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http://www.dataqualitypro.com/download-centre/tutorial-materials/

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