Data cleansing, also referred to as data scrubbing, the act of detecting and removing and/or correcting a database’s dirty data. Dirty data may be any data that is:
- incorrect
- out-of-date
- redundant
- incomplete
- formatted incorrectly
The goal of data cleansing is not just to clean up the data in a database but also to bring consistency to different sets of data that have been merged from separate databases. Sophisticated software applications are available to clean a database’s data using algorithms, rules and look-up tables, a task that was once done manually and therefore still subject to human error.
Other Uses
Data cleansing is also the phrase used to describe the act of correcting parity bit errors so that drives remain synchronized in a RAID system.
