Information Quality: How Good are Off-the-shelf DBMs?

Abstract

Commercial database management systems (DBMS) have come a long way with respect to efficiency and more recently, with respect to quality and user friendliness. Not only do they provide an efficient means to store large amounts of data and intuitive query languages to access the data, popular DBMS also provide a whole suite of tools to assess, store, manage, clean, and retrieve data in a user-friendly way. Some of these feature address database experts, others are targeted at end-users with little or even no database knowledge. The recent developments in the field of autonomic computing drive the easeof- use even further. In this chapter we study how well a typical DBMS meets the goal of providing a high-quality data storage and retrieval facility. To this end, we draw on an established set of information quality criteria and assess how well an exemplary DBMS fares. While quality criteria are usually defined for a set of data, we extend, wherever possible, the definitions to the systems that manage this data.