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ETLQ - Integrated Data Quality from SAS

The saying "garbage in, garbage out" is as old as the IT business itself. But the sad fact is that data quality remains a major headache for IT professionals. For a number of reasons:
  • Organisations collect information from an ever-increasing variety of sources, including legacy and ERP systems, call centres and external providers
  • The data comes from incompatible systems, often as a consequence of mergers and acquisitions
  • Data entry is inaccurate
  • There are no common business rules or standards

Extracting from an application using ETL Studio
Extracting from an application using ETL Studio
 
The cost of poor data quality is often considerable. For IT, it means additional work and delays for information consumers. For business it means a poor image with customers, lost sales opportunities, reduced efficiency and poor decision-making. Gartner predict that, "Through 2006, more than 50 percent of BI and data warehouse efforts will have limited acceptance or will fail because of lack of attention to data quality". (Ref: SPA-18-8622, 18 December 2002:Implementing Business Intelligence to Succeed, not Fail).

There is no set definition of data quality but a recent TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) survey revealed that data standardisation and verification are the main issues behind failed warehouse projects. For years, IT professionals have said there must be a better way to do things, and now, with the SAS Data Quality Solution there is.

The SAS Data Quality Solution integrates data quality into the extraction, transformation and load (ETL) stages that exist in any Business Intelligence (BI) project. Data quality is therefore "built-in" automating otherwise expensive manual data rectification work.

The SAS Data Quality Solution uses Intelligent Data Integration (IDI) to consolidate legacy and non-legacy data. IDI identifies and corrects data quality problems automatically, working with all data sources and platforms thereby saving time and ensuring accuracy and consistency.

SAS gives you the power to retrieve and deliver consistent, accurate and reliable information - a single version of the truth - to the business community.

For further information on Integrated Data Quality from SAS visit http://www.sas.com/technologies/data_warehouse/etl.html

Join us at the SAS Data Quality Showcase in Marlow on 2nd April

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