Re: Storing Data in a Standard Format or not

>> We have are constructing a database from a collection of external
datasets.
The external datasets talk about the same information but will represent it in different formats. <<

I am reading a book on data quality by Jack Olsen. One of his horror stories is about porting old data to SQL. Since SQL has temporal data types, they wanted to get the old Cobol stuff into the new format. They found 94 different date and time formats (that is not at typo).

I would strongly recommend sitting down with the data dictionary for the project, and defining units of measurement, precision, scale, etc. for all the data elements, then define the conversion rules and put them into code that everyone will be using. That way you don't have to worry that inches to centimetres is done with 2.540, 2.54 or 2.5 as the conversion factor. Received on Tue Feb 11 2003 - 00:14:40 CET