The Information Quality of Databases

A database is only as good as the data in it. Transaction-processing systems and decision-support systems provide data for strategic planning and operations. Thus, it is important to not only recognize the quality of information in databases, but also to deal with it. Research in information quality has addressed the issues of defining, measuring and improving quality in databases; commercial tools have been created to automate the process of cleaning and correcting data; and new laws have been created that deal with the fallout of poor information quality. These issues will be discussed in the next sections.