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Understanding NOLOCK hint in SELECT clause- PART 2
Part 2 of the article series on understanding the NOLOCK hint in SELECT clause.
Data Backup, Validation and Sourcing Comments
Stephen writes: "Single source information (SSI?), interesting concept, however, here in the medical informatics world we call that ‘data quality’ and we have Data Quality working groups (of which I’m a member of here at the 6th Medical Group, MacDill AFB FL) that deal with “data quality” across the enterprise and the myriad set of systems we derive our medical metrical data. So, what have I said? Essentially, in the DoD for the MHS (Military Health System) we care about the ‘truth’ that data is conveying to us and to that end we have established a fairly sophisticated data quality analysis system composed of core working groups in each base hospital and then upper echelon working groups for each command level above the base, so, the senior leadership can believe what they see in a report regarding ‘numbers’ generated (i.e., Pap Smear rate for active duty women in the 30 -35 year group).
We have found that automated solutions alone cannot be the total cure – that is the bottom line."
…and Sam wrote: "I think that you’re talking about 2 different types of information:
1. Information that is collected by your internal corporate systems
2. Information that is collected from the public domain
For information collected from the public domain, there is no way to verify the source of the information. So, in order to verify as best you can, you try to confirm the data from multiple sources. This is what intelligence organizations have been doing for many years. It adds confusion to the scenario, but the common points from different sources can be said to be valid.
For information collected from your internal corporate systems, I would hope that this could be considered a valid source, at least for your purposes. If it’s not, you can fix it so that it is considered a valid source. In this situation, I think that a single source of truth is desirable, because it can be assumed that the single source is trustworthy. Once you have a trustworthy source of data, multiple sources would only add confusion to this scenario, with no benefits to be gained.
I think this is what’s driving the trend you are seeing. First, there was only internal corporate data…so the single source of the truth was a good idea. But now we have the proliferation of public data being integrated into these systems, and this is causing people to want to confirm that publicly-sourced data that they are getting because it’s not from a verifiable source."
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