Last week I joined a small team of my colleagues at work to attend a one day seminar held by a small (non-profit) start up company called “Data Quality Institute (DQI)”, more precisely by Dejan Sarka and Uroš Godnov. The topic was an introduction to “Data Quality” from organizational and practical (technical) point of the view.

I think I first met Dejan Sarka at his course covering MS SQL Server 6.5 Administration in 1996 (or perhaps 1997?). And since then I always thought `what a pity that he took a MS SQL Server career path instead of Oracle´ :-). Of course, he’s best known as a top MS SQL Server expert, but nowadays I think his main obsession is development and application of different mathematical algorithms to achieve better quality of data stored in our relational database management systems. All demos he showed us were more or less pure SQL statements (with some helper functions written in C#) executed on MS SQL Server and the data mining methods where demonstrated with MS Analysis Services, thought it’s quite possible to recode everything for Oracle RDBMS. At present DQI doesn’t have a prepackaged product with a shiny user interface to demonstrate the power of their methodology, but this is really not their main objective at present (I think!?).

Anyway, it was a mind-boggling day for IT part of our team, that clearly showed us how weak our knowledge about Data Quality really is. Hopefully, with researches and companies like DQI things on this (often neglected) field can only get better and at the same time for the right price as well – a bad news for those overpriced software package vendors out there, I’m afraid. If you care about data quality then make sure you put DQI on your radar. We certainly did.