Netrics HD

We often get asked what creates the business-data problems that Netrics solves… Why is database data not perfect? How can databases make mistakes?

These business problems arise because of computers’ well-defined limitations – after all, they’re just fancy calculators. Calculators that can perform billions of operations every second – quite amazing when you think about it. Built into every CPU is the capability to compare data – but these data comparisons are limited to “equals” or “not equals” – that’s all.

These same limitations propagate up to the applications (i.e. databases) that run on these CPUs. So, if you ask any commercially available DBMS (e.g., Oracle, IBM DB2, MS SQLServer, MySQL, Cache, etc) to retrieve a record where the last name is “Damianakis” then that’s exactly what it’s going to do.

But what happens if “Damianakis” is actually in the database as “Damanakos” and also as “Dananakis? Easy, the DBMS will find neither - at least not with built-in database operators. Someone needs to build an abstraction layer that uses the built-in database operators to address this issue.

And thus the can of worms is opened…