Gadgets and Technology

As any database or data warehouse administrator will tell you, most of the required consistency checks are complex. Most copy management tools do not have the capability of applying these checks directly. Specifically, a number of products that claim to have this facility implement it by allowing users to code the logic in either SQL, stored procedures. or their own programming language. What this means is that a substantial amount of development time is spent just implementing this logic. This problem will leads one to recommend that you investigate the cost-benefit of using a copy management tool, prior to making the purchasing decision. If the source systems do not overlap much, and the consistency checks are simplistic, a copy management tool will cut down the coding effort required. If this is not the case, a copy management tool may not add sufficient value to justify purchase.

To prevent errors, make sure that when you take a row of data and examine it, the contents of the row must make sense. Errors at this point are mainly to do with errors in the source systems. Typical checks are for nonsensical phone numbers, addresses, counts, and so on. When you examine the data against other tables within the same source, the data must make sense. For example, one can check for the existence of the stock-keeping unit (SKU)/customer/service specified in the transaction, by comparing it with the list of valid SK Us/customers/services.