What’s Wrong With My Data? - High-Performance Web Databases: Design, Development, and Deployment - page 416

Exhibit 27-4. Example of primary key problems.

Data File “A”

Identifier Last Name Sex Age Smoker

523 Smith M 00 N

524 Jones F 23 Y

526 Lee M 42

527 Frank 17 Y

528 Yu M 00 N

Data File “D”

Last Name First Name Department Yrs Employed Salary

Smith Fred 40 2 50000

Smith Sid 40 3 75000

Lee Tom 30 3 60000

Yu Robert 50 1 45000

Yu Ted 30 6 80000

Non-Standardized and/or Multi-Element Fields

In Exhibit 27-5:

• Do all these people work for the same company? If there were 5,000
records to look at instead of just five, would you be able to identify the
variations? Company names have not been standardized, and this is
just a flavor of the possible result.
• In the field there is an even worse lack of standards.

Some titles are spelled out in full (“Vice President”), others are abbre-
viated (“Sr V.P.”) Some names are accompanied by designations
(“Mr.”), others aren't. And do we include the department or division
(“I.S.”), or don't we?
• The positioning of the information in the

Name and Title

field is also in-
consistent, with some last names first, some first names first, one title
(marketing representative) preceding the name while the others fol-
low the name, and so on.
• In fact, there are several individual elements contained within the

Name and Title

field, which is a large part of the problem. These ele-
ments include the First Name, Last Name, Initial (if any), Designation
(e.g., Mr., Dr.), Title, the Department (e.g., I.S., Operations), and even in
one case Degrees (B.Comm.)
• The individual elements within

Name and Title

are almost impossible
to work with as they are now. Even a simple alphabetical report sorted
by last name could be impractical. Clearly, separate fields for separate
elements makes life much easier.

Name and Title