Duplicate data is one of the most common data quality issues. It can cost businesses time, money, and resources – yet is often overlooked.
Without the right measures in place to correct this, duplicate entries can wreak havoc on your database, impacting marketing campaigns, workplace efficiency, and storage space. The good news is that companies can avoid this with data deduplication. This is a process that removes duplicate entries from databases, helping data perform more effectively with better precision and accuracy.
In this guide, we cover everything you need to know about data deduplication. Learn how to identify duplicate data, how it can impact your business and marketing activities, and how to deduplicate data.
What is data deduplication?
Data deduplication is the process of reducing the amount of duplicate data stored on a system. By identifying and removing duplicate data, you can reduce the amount of storage space needed to store your data. This is especially useful for large datasets that contain a lot of redundant data, such as backups.
For example, if you have a terabyte of files in your system and you want to save space, then data deduplication will find all those entries that are identical to each other. It will then store only one copy of each data entry and remove the others.
Deduplication is so popular because it allows data to be stored more efficiently. For businesses, this has a huge range of cost and time saving benefits – but not many organisations understand how to deduplicate data.
In this article, we take a look at the process of data deduplication, including how to identify, remove and prevent duplicate data entries. Let’s get started.
What causes duplicate data?
Duplicate data occurs when storing the same data entries in the same data storage system, or across multiple systems. This can occur accidentally. For instance, data may become duplicated as a result of human error, where an individual’s data has been entered more than once within the same database.
Although, data duplication can also be done intentionally, for example, to create a copy in case the data becomes damaged. Data is also sometimes duplicated to improve its availability within an organisation, particularly in distributed systems where components are spread out over a network.
For example, if you have a business with multiple offices around the world and each office has its own server containing documents like contracts, purchase orders and invoices, there may be some overlap between these documents because they’re likely to have similar information — such as an invoice number or an order number. This information is likely to appear in many different documents from different offices.
In either case, duplicate data costs businesses time, money and storage space. The good news is that thanks to modern technology, data deduplication software can identify these commonalities and remove duplicate entries.
The benefits of data deduplication
Data deduplication can help businesses in several ways:
Reduce storage costs:
Data deduplication reduces the amount of storage required by eliminating redundant copies of data. This means that businesses can cut down on their storage costs significantly. Instead of buying more expensive storage solutions, which are often overkill for small businesses and mid-size companies, using deduplication technology can save you money on capital expenditures, as well as operational expenditures.
Avoid marketing mishaps:
Let’s say you have two data entries containing the same name, address, phone number and email address. If you don’t have some sort of system in place that would prevent you from sending marketing emails to both customers then you would end up paying twice for sending one email!
Reduce storage space:
Data deduplication can significantly decrease the amount of storage required to store your primary data. It is often less expensive to store smaller amounts of data, and is also a lot more simple to handle – resulting in better cost and time efficiency.
Increase backup efficiency:
Data deduplication allows organisations to perform backups more efficiently by reducing the number of data entries being backed up at any one time. This improves backup speed, makes backups more reliable, and saves money on storage space required for backups.
Improve application performance:
When the same piece of data is accessed frequently, it triggers read operations from storage devices, which increases latency and affects application performance negatively (especially in cases where several applications access the same shared resource). Deduplication removes redundant copies from storage devices, so applications don’t have to wait as long when retrieving them from disk drives or tape libraries; this improves overall application performance.
Improve compliance:
Data deduplication can also help companies with compliance requirements because it allows them to store less sensitive information and only retain what’s necessary for regulatory compliance purposes. As part of GDPR laws, businesses are required to make sure data is accurate and high-quality; which means checking up on data duplicates.
Reduce data redundancy:
Deduplication can reduce redundant data entries by identifying and removing duplicate copies of files that are stored on multiple servers within an organisation. Reducing redundancy leads to better performance for applications that access shared resources because they don’t have to wait as long for data retrieval.
How does deduplication work?
Data deduplication works by comparing the contents of each data entry against those of other entries in the same dataset. If a data entry matches another one already in the system, then it will be removed.
Deduplication is most effective on large volumes of data where the same entries are often repeated; it can help to reduce the amount of storage space needed by up to 90% without affecting performance.
Understanding data deduplication ratios
The data deduplication ratio is the amount of space saved by using data deduplication. This is an important figure that quantifies how much space you could save by deduplicating your dataset.
Data deduplication ratios vary widely depending on the type of application and data being stored. For example, if there are 1,000 unique files and 2,000 total files, the deduplication ratio would be 50%.
The ratio may be more complex depending on the data systems being used to hold data, and the amount of data that needs deduplication. For instance, if your business had 100 TB of data distributed over 25 TB in four separate servers, then you could reduce your total storage footprint from 100 TB to 25 TB by implementing data deduplication technology, with a ratio of 75%.
The data deduplication ratio is important because it provides an estimate of how much duplicate data will be removed from a storage system. This helps you understand how much space can be saved by running data deduplication software on your network or server environment.
How to deduplicate data
To deduplicate data, you can use a variety of tools. Here are some options:
Create a data cleansing schedule
Data is only useful if it is clean, accurate and can perform the job it is intended for. That also includes deduplicating data entries. Companies can benefit from having a regular data cleansing schedule that addresses issues such as duplication, alongside other data quality issues. This is a key part of the data quality management process. You might look at data duplication and quality monthly, quarterly, or even bi-weekly depending on how frequently new data is acquired.
Identify duplicates
The first step is to identify duplicate records in your database. You can do this manually, or automatically with a deduplication tool. Manual identification involves comparing each record against every other record in the system, usually in a spreadsheet software such as Excel or Google Sheets.
You can also use a database query and filter the results based on certain criteria. However, this is not too efficient either because you will have to run multiple queries for each condition that you want to check for duplicates.
If you’re using manual identification, then be prepared for this step to take a long time, especially if your dataset contains a large number of records. For the most part, it is much simpler and quicker to identify duplicates through a deduplication tool.
Use a data deduplication tool
A database deduplication tool will help you identify and remove duplicates from your database. For example, if you have an employee database that stores the name, address, and phone number for each employee, it may contain multiple records for the same person with only slight differences between them (for example, “John Smith” and “J Smith”).
When it comes to using a deduplication tool, there are many reasons why businesses may want to use this type of software. For one thing, it’s incredibly useful when working with large amounts of data that are often duplicated throughout an organisation such as customer records or sales orders.
Online: the online data management platform
Optimise your data with ease in our all in one data management platform: Online. This lets you deduplicate your data in just a few simple steps. Upload your data and let the system identify duplicate entries for you. No need to sift through them manually.
Maintain data quality the easy way.
Prevent data duplication on user input
Duplicate data entries are a big problem in business and can cause a lot of issues if not addressed early on. You can use one of these methods to ensure data uniqueness:
- Create a central database for all customer data
- Use validation rules for each field on your form
- Structure your data so that it can be easily searched and accessed
- Database trigger that checks for duplicate values during insert operations.
- Database constraint that checks for duplicate values during insert and update operations.
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