Reliable data is the warehouse's foundation. Even organizations that purport to have perfectly clean data may eventually find themselves in need of data scrubbing software. In this age, no organization can truly claim to have absolutely clean data. The need for scrubbing also arises when a manager inherits an incompatible database through a merger or acquisition. In those cases, data scrubbing tools offer the only practical way to quickly convert large amounts of data.
Organizations can select from a wide array of data scrubbing tools.
The software uses a series of sophisticated algorithms to identify and correct anomalies in names, addresses and other data. Postalsoft Inc. of La Crosse, Wis., also offers a series of single-purpose data scrubbing products. Until recently, data warehouse vendors offered only simple integrity checking, which ensures that records are loaded accurately from a source database to their new repository but is powerless to do anything about data that's dirty at the source. Those vendors are now beginning to climb on-board the data scrubbing bandwagon. Integrity checking doesn't address the problem at the source, where data integrity problems typically lurk.