Dirty data is inaccurate, incomplete or erroneous data, especially in a computer system or database.
In reference to databases, this is data that contain errors. Unclean data can contain such mistakes as spelling or punctuation errors, incorrect data associated with a field, incomplete or outdated data, or even data that has been duplicated in the database.
Famous quotes containing the words dirty and/or data:
“He shakes the dust from off his feet
And shambles down the dirty street
The last man in the town, they said,
Who’d shot a hundred Yankees dead.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)