3. How to make the data more complete

Too little data

There needs to be enough data gathered that you can glean some reasonable conclusions from it.

For instance, a database is built to find out the average shoe size of people in the UK. Just asking ten people at random is not likely to be enough to trust the answer to the question.

Irrelevant data

All the data needs to be relevant to the intended purpose. For example, wanting to find out the lowest, average and largest weight of women age 18-70 in London.

Gathering the wrong data could include

  • Storing the weight of men (wrong gender)
  • Storing the weight of women in Cardiff (wrong place)
  • Storing the weight of young girls (wrong age)

Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: Making a database fit for purpose